Jay P. Greene's Blog

Courtesy of the World Health Organization

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Further to Jay’s post below on how the supposed swine flu “pandemic” is sounding a lot like the ad for Old Glory Robot Insurance:

Michael Fumento, who has made a career out of calling BS on the political abuse of medicine, reports on just how bogus the swine flu panic is – and more importantly, the agenda behind it.

The World Health Organization’s old definition of “pandemic” required an outbreak not only to consist of multiple epidemics around the world, but also to pose an unusually severe threat to life and health before it could be called a pandemic. This was important because plain old ordinary flu causes multiple simultaneous epidemics around the world all the time, but it’s no cause for alarm because the plain old ordinary flu is a routine problem.

But just before swine flu was declared a pandemic, the WHO quietly rewrote the definition of “pandemic” to remove the necessity of an unusually serious threat.

Why’d they have to do that? Because the swine flu is actually less deadly – by orders of magnitude – than the regular flu:

Medically, the pandemic moniker is unjustifiable. When the sacrosanct World Health Organization (WHO) made its official declaration in June, we were 11 weeks into the outbreak, and swine flu had only killed 144 people worldwide — the same number who die of seasonal flu worldwide every few hours. The mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people worldwide. And even after six months, swine flu has killed about as many people as the seasonal flu does every six days…

In Australia and New Zealand, flu season has ended, and almost all cases have been swine flu. Yet even without a vaccine, these countries are reporting fewer flu deaths than normal. (In New Zealand, that’s just 18 confirmed deaths compared with 400 normally.) Swine flu is causing negative deaths! [ea]

Update: When I originally posted this I forgot to include this wonderful tidbit. One of the very classy methods being used in the media to hype the swine flu is to report the total number of cases of all types of flu, including even undiagnosed cases with “flu-like symptoms.” Then the total figures for flu deaths and flu cases are falsely reported as swine flu figures.

Why would the WHO want to gin up a baseless panic about swine flu? Partly because they had already over-hyped avian flu and wanted to use a new panic over swine flu to retroactively justify the old panic over avian flu. “The world can now reap the benefits of investments over the last five years in pandemic preparedness,” boasts WHO’s director-general.

And partly it’s for the same reason the Old Glory Insurance Company wants you to believe in robot attacks – money. Apparently WHO makes a living off phony disease scares:

Yet this [CYA for the avian flu scare] doesn’t explain why the agency hyped avian flu in the first place, nor why it exaggerated HIV infections by more than 10 times, or why it spread hysteria over Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). That disease ultimately killed a day’s worth of seasonal flu victims before vanishing.

But the SARS scare was enough, leading to a broad expansion of WHO powers, including a degree of direct authority over national health agencies. It’s now using that to leverage more authority and a bigger budget. No shocker there.

But at least the Old Glory Insurance Company only wanted to take your money. They didn’t want to take your freedom as well. Not so much can be said for the WHO:

What may be surprising is that it wants to use that power to help bring about a global economic and social revolution–and that Director-General Chan was so blunt about it in a speech in Copenhagen last month.

She said “ministers of health” should take advantage of the “devastating impact” swine flu will have on poorer nations to tell “heads of state and ministers of finance, tourism and trade” that:

• The belief that “living conditions and health status of the poor would somehow automatically improve as countries modernized, liberalized their trade and improved their economies” is false. Wealth doesn’t equal health.
• “Changes in the functioning of the global economy” are needed to “distribute wealth on the basis of” values “like community, solidarity, equity and social justice.”
• “The international policies and systems that govern financial markets, economies, commerce, trade and foreign affairs have not operated with fairness as an explicit policy objective.”

In related news, the WHO has announced a new panel of doctors to wield those “special emergency powers” we need to sweep away “bureaucratic obstacles” and combat swine flu. Here they are: