Yes, I remain a Swine Flu skeptic – meaning I think it should be monitored, of course, but isn’t that big a deal. I don’t know a single person with Swine Flu yet – or even anybody who knows anyone anywhere in the world who has it.
And, yes, I could be criticized for falling into the Pauline Kael trap when she famously said in astonishment at Nixon’s election that she didn’t know a single person who had voted for the man from Whittier. Nevertheless, tens of millions voted for Nixon, while, thus far, the CDC validates a grand total of 160 cases (mostly mild) in 21 states. In other words, you still have about as much chance of dying of spinach overdose as you do of Swine Flu.
SF remains a “Media Flu” fanned by CNN, Drudge, etc. and seems even to have infected otherwise brilliant members of the media with whom I normally agree. [So maybe it's you.-ed. Shut up. I told you I came from a medical family. Read my book. It's on my night table.]
Worth noting is what enhances this media flu: political bile. Just as the left made a heyday (oh, how they made a heyday!) out of Bush’s reaction to Katrina, the right is attacking Obama on Swine Flu. It’s all nonsense. The right, of all people, should realize the President is not God. He (POTUS) does not control natural phenomena. He does, however, control his policies. Let’s go after those – especially the substantive ones.
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25 Comments
1. Richard Nieporent:Wolf (Mad Cow Disease)
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Wolf (Ebola)
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Wolf (SARS)
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Wolf (Bird Flu)
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Wolf (Swine Flu)?
May 2, 2009 - 9:33 am 2. Lightnin' Hopkins:The thought of the press coverage of Obama’s “swift” reaction to a potential Gulf hurricane during his term makes me think I’m coming down with a little something myself. The great ones rise to the occasion, you see. Trailing clouds of glory, buzzing the Superdome on his way in and landing like some kind of empathetic super hero; Anderson Cooper overcome by the vapors. You get the idea.
May 2, 2009 - 10:13 am 3. Barry Dauphin:The MSM always has something to get hot over. It was the summer of the shark right before 9/11.
May 2, 2009 - 11:03 am 4. Margie:“Wolf” is right…no one will believe the media when a real pandemic strikes.
May 2, 2009 - 11:34 am 5. Larry J:I can say that I know someone who knows someone who has swine flu. My son is a nurse at a Marine base and he has treated one confirmed case. Other than that, not so much.
Reportedly, some 36,000 Americans die of ordinary flu every year. So far, it appears swine flu is another media front passing through. I just wonder if it’s a case of misdirection to deflect attention from something else or if this will be part of a play for greater government intrusion into health care.
May 2, 2009 - 12:15 pm 6. John Moore:Wolf (Mad Cow Disease)
…….it wasn’t until years into the nvCJD (Mad Cow Disease) that it was clear that the disease was limited. CJD is a big deal if you get it. nvCJD turns out to only infe
Wolf (Ebola)
…Yep, that’s a wolf. No epidemic potential.
Wolf (SARS)
… Nope. SARS was just barely contained. It was an extremely dangerous variant of the common cold and quite contagious. It damned near killed a whole bunch of us.
Wolf (Bird Flu)
Still a major candidate for the next deadly pandemic. No wolf.
Wolf (Swine Flu)?
Probably will reach pandemic levels because of novel antigens, but is apparently relatively mild (it’ll only kill a few thousand in the US, which is hardly noticeable compared to normal flu).
May 2, 2009 - 12:31 pm 7. David Thomson:The Swine Flu scare is beyond silly. If it is not already killing thousands of people—then it isn’t likely ever to do so. The media outlets merely wish to exaggerate the dangers to attract a larger audience. Obama’s people are also taking advantage of this madness to push their health care plans.
May 2, 2009 - 12:36 pm 8. John Moore:Roger,
The public health folks face the same problem with emerging diseases that weather forecasters have. Because of uncertainty but the great impact if they are right, they must take rapid action and enact precautions that later turn out to be unnecessary.
Also, this one may be mild now, and may not reach pandemic levels this spring (because right now is about the time northern hemisphere flu epidemics die out), it may come back next winter as a major danger (more virulent).
To get a good idea about what the infectious disease folks think about this, check out the PRO-MED mailing list and read the editorial comments (in brackets at the end of some articles).
May 2, 2009 - 12:37 pm 9. Richard Nieporent:John, apparently you have a different understanding of the story of the boy who cried wolf than the rest of us do. Nobody disputes the potential for any of these diseases to result in a deadly pandemic. Clearly it is the job of public health officials to monitor and track the progress of these diseases and to issue health advisories when it makes sense to do so. However, what we had instead is the media hyping each of these events as if a deadly pandemic was occurring. Instead of giving us factual information so that we know when it is necessary to take appropriate precautions they run around shouting like Chicken Little that the sky is falling. When this happens enough times, I and many other people ignore their reports of impending disaster because all of their previous warnings were wrong. Thus, when in the future a pandemic actually occurs, more people will die than would have due to all of those previous incorrect warnings. That, John, is the point of the story of the boy who cried wolf.
May 2, 2009 - 3:10 pm 10. Richard Nieporent:On a somewhat related item, I just got an advertisement for a Cinco De Mayo Sweepstakes that is being run by the company Furmano’s. The grand prize for the sweepstakes is a $3000 trip for two to Mexico. Talk about bad timing for an advertising campaign!
May 2, 2009 - 3:16 pm 11. Terrye:Influenza killed 50 million people world wide in 1918. That was a disaster. This is a distraction.
May 2, 2009 - 5:36 pm 12. ts:Pauline Kael never uttered that line about Nixon. Conservatives ought to stop using it has a crutch — it’s lazy.
May 3, 2009 - 4:59 am 13. Lightnin' Hopkins:From Wikipedia:
(There is, in fact, no record of Kael making such a remark. The story may have originated in a December 28, 1972 New York Times article on a lecture Kael gave at the Modern Language Association, in which the newspaper quoted her as saying, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”)
Pretty close, I’d say. There is “no record” of the quote, except the one they go on to cite in the very same paragraph! Then again, it did appear in the Times, no bastion of media accuracy (although much more on the ball in ‘72, to be sure).
It’s been a long time but I found many of Kael’s reviews interesting and informative when I first began reading seriously about cinema. Frankly, I don’t see what’s so denigrating about citing a published quote from someone to make a simple point in a blog post. She ran in “liberal” circles (a “special world”) so it makes perfect sense that she probably didn’t personally know many Nixon voters. So who cares? As lazy crutches go, it’s pretty tame compared to the ones the left leans on concerning much weightier issues than Pauline Kael’s lunch companions nearly four decades ago.
May 3, 2009 - 10:18 am 14. Ellsworth:And your point regarding this post is, ts?
May 3, 2009 - 11:29 am 15. Barry Dauphin:Despite my cynicism about the hype, it probably does some good. Assuming this turns out well, the probability that we were on the verge of something bigger is one of the known unknowns, to coin a phrase. It remains beyond our grasp to get a handle on how bad it could have been without the precautions being taken now at many levels of government. Somewhere in here is a lesson about terrorism I think.
May 3, 2009 - 4:33 pm 16. Arty:‘Swine media’ is a bigger threat than ‘media flu’.
May 3, 2009 - 4:47 pm 17. Arty:‘Swine media’ is a bigger threat than ‘media flu’. I’m referring to the smear campaign against Carrie Prejean.
May 3, 2009 - 4:51 pm 18. Arty:Thought I better clarify that. There’s lots of good media people too.
May 3, 2009 - 5:03 pm 19. Conceit:I like when Roger argues with his editor. Reminds me of Dom DeLuise’s character in The End.
May 3, 2009 - 6:01 pm 20. ElMondo:John Moore is right. Epidemiologists are getting worked up over this because of the potential for disaster, not because we’re already at that point. We’re not. The whole issue with this specific variant is that the human population doesn’t have an aquired immunity to any part of it already; contrast this to the “Hong Kong” flu of 1968, which had similarities to previous strains that led to an attenuation of the outbreak. The point here is that if this current round of “swine flu” really takes off, it can be terribly serious.
As far as the press goes: Roger’s completely right for tweaking their inability to properly set context, but what goes unsaid is that it’s actually rather accurate to call this a “pandemic”. An “epidemic” is, in loose terms, nothing more than an increase over the norm for a period of time (from what I recall from long-ago college classes, that’s typically set to be a year, although I should be corrected on this if I’m not remembering correctly). A “pandemic” are points of epidemics in multiple, distinct geographic regions. So technically, this “swine flu” event is indeed a “pandemic” in that there are multiple points across the globe with more incidents than the baseline. It’s just that the numbers themselves are pretty low, but they meet the definitions, so that’s why the terms are used.
However, despite the numbers (and while I’m at it, in getting back to John Moore’s post) we still need to pay attention to the trends here, because the potential danger inherent in a second wave (like John said: “… it may come back next winter as a major danger (more virulent).“) is definitely something to be concerned about. Science and history tells us that the second wave of pandemics tend to be bad; as an aside, that’s one piece of context I wish the mainstream news outlets would communicate! The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 also had a light, mild first wave, but the second one eventually killed over 20 million. And that was with an infection that had a death rate of only 2.5%; the numbers of people that had to be infected to result in that number of deaths is staggering. At any rate, it’s not this round of infections I’m worried about.
While I would fault the news for being behind, late, and lackadaisical at getting context reported, let alone reported correctly, I still think it’s important enough for them to cover it as much as they have. I’d only quibble about properly setting the context, and for not putting much out there on why early measures, as alarmist as some of them are, are important. Better to nip a new variant in the bud than set a new chapter of edpidemiologic history.
May 4, 2009 - 7:27 am 21. Lily:Help me understand this: why has the government called for schools to close for two weeks if there is one case of this flu bug at the school, but the same government is telling us not to curtail travel in any way?
Something is not right.
May 4, 2009 - 9:33 am 22. Lily:ElMondo and John Moore: there is potiential danger all around – every day.
A little caution is a good thing. Over caution, however, leads to no good.
May 4, 2009 - 9:35 am 23. Lily:Does an OVERREACTION now lessen the chance that this will turn deadly in the next go-around?
Sorry for the triple post but this is really starting to bug me – especially coming from the ‘never let a good crisis go to waste administration’.
May 4, 2009 - 9:38 am 24. frank:What about all the press about Elephantine Flu? Is the GOP that sick?
May 4, 2009 - 9:56 am 25. tim maguire:Just as the left made a heyday (oh, how they made a heyday!) out of Bush’s reaction to Katrina, the right is attacking Obama on Swine Flu.
Are anyone on the right really attacking Obama on Swine Flu? If you say it’s so, then I believe it, but I have not seen a single instance.
May 4, 2009 - 11:44 am