Posted on 09/09/2009 8:24:18 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology issued an alarming report on swine flu last week. A typical front-page article about it began, "Swine flu could infect half the U.S. population this fall and winter, hospitalizing up to 1.8 million people and causing as many as 90,000 deaths."
But the council's "plausible scenario" involving those alarming figures is based on three main assumptions, and all three are highly suspect...
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
Good article.
So far, it has never been demonstrated to me that I’ve been on the wrong side of a real science issue, to include drawing attention to Darwin’s unscientific creation myth. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see we can agree on something now and again.
Sincerely—GGG
Stopped clock
If I didn’t know better, I would think that the 90,000 deaths from H1N1 was being used as a scare tactic to drive Zero’s health reform platform.
But, that would just be silly talk ....
Obama trading on fear???? Oh, no, not our Obama! He wouldn’t......would he????
Here is my saved copy of the story as it appeared August 27, 2009 (If you don't have it already, get Firefox 3.5 with the extension 'scrapbook' to save and search web pages easily.)
Article in it's entirety follows ...
Nearly 90,000 deaths from swine flu this fall? Not quite, the chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.
“Everything we've seen in the U.S. and everything we've seen around the world suggests we won't see that kind of number if the virus doesn't change,” Dr. Thomas Frieden said in a C-SPAN interview taped Wednesday.
Frieden’s downgrading of the swine flu threat marks yet another volley in what appears to be a growing battle between the CDC and the White House's top medical advisors over the dangers of the next wave of the H1N1 virus.
On Monday, the White House unveiled a grim report estimating the swine flu will wipe out up to 90,000 Americans in the coming months. The deadly virus will also infect half of the population and force some 1.8 million people into hospital intensive care units, the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology predicted.
Dr. Harold Varmus, the New York doctor who spearheaded the report, told the Daily News Tuesday the “flu could be extremely dangerous” and “needs to be taken seriously.”
But a day earlier, after Varmus’ estimates were released, Frieden and White House health czar Kathleen Sebelius virtually ignored them.
Sebelius merely acknowledged that swine flu “will cause a more serious threat this fall.”
Bolstering the notion that even the White House was at odds with Varmus’ report, its release came with little fanfare and no official news conference.
What's more, the panel's dire report appears to have been released two weeks late. It was dated Aug. 7.
Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Swine flu was first detected in Mexico in April.
The highly-contagious virus killed 47 New Yorkers and plunged the city into chaos. A raft of schools were shuttered and the sick and panicked overwhelmed emergency rooms.
The virus infected more than 1 million people across the nation.
Thank you. It seems the one remaining areas of government that people blindly put their trust in is Public Health Movement. They want to micromanage everything from fast food to guns by relabeling these political issues as “epidemics” that need to be fought using fascist public health measures. In short, the hard-left is attempting to slip socialism through the back door of one of the few areas of government that people still trust...after all, who could be against the public’s health?
I’m sending the article off to friends and family....MAYBE...just MAYBE some of them will finally start GETTING it! You cannot trust the GOVERNMENT in ANYTHING! (well, except maybe Military protection.)
I will go out on a limb and say that the 2009/2010 flu season (which will be about average) will kill thousands - cause that’s what it does. But the News media will do a Katrina on it and make the 36,000 deaths into a National Emergency.
News story from April 2009
Regular flu has killed thousands since January
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/28/regular.flu/index.html
“the virus would have a long way to go to match the roughly 36,000 deaths that seasonal influenza causes in the United States each year.”
And, this is precisely why I do not hyperventilate with alarm every time I read an article about the swine flu. One would anticipate cross immunity from such an H1N1 flu bug that is, although different, antigenically similar to those which we have been exposed, and for which we have been innoculated, for fifty years.
This scientist is most wary of the scare warnings, (global warming, swine flu, etc) alleging an imprimatur of "science", repeated over-and-over, and clearly designed to frighten us into yielding freedoms and wealth.
How is this different from "terrorism"?
.
Things that have “death rates” are ignored at your own peril.
The former President through Homeland Security already had put in place what was needed for a pandemic. Obama and Rham gained even more through ‘crisis’ hype, and now we find out after securing even more Billions for pandemics, they are ‘watering down’ the shots to spread them out. Why???????? And we are now being told, it’s a flu, wash your hands and cover your mouth when you cough, with demonstrations on how to cough being done by Sebelius...costly demonstrations, eh? Which every kindergartner is taught and mother’s across America teach to 3 year olds!
Do you really believe Obama's handlers are that stupid?
LIFE has a death rate of 1.0. 1 death for every life.
“fifty” years should read “thirty” years. (Doh!)
If "flu" is what's happening now, I pay attention.
Do you consider the basis for the projected “death rate” critically, or is that not part of what you pay attention to?
Yup, stupid and arrogant - otherwise he wouldn't dare staff his Czars with the likes of Van Jones and his ilk. Dangerously stupid ... and even more dangerously arrogant.
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