Flu Swines

By Sova

After our media warned us left and right about the horrors of Swine Flu which was dubbed "Swine Flu", because it was quickly discovered that H1N1 does not sound scary enough. And after promised horrors failed to materialize and dust has somewhat settled it is time to count the winners and losers.

Among the winners I'd name [GlaxoSmithKline] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlaxoSmithKline). Among the losers are tax payers, medical insurance companies and the occasional odd case of side effects such as Donna Hartlen from Whitby, Ontario, Canada.

Now in all fairness I should say that I could be wrong because Donna Hartlen could have contracted the Guillain-Barre Syndrome from other sources. And one can also claim that it was thanks to immunization that wide-spread outbreak was prevented. One can also claim that more lives were saved than lost.

In truth we will never really know one way or the other.

What we do know is that Glaxo Smith Kline made massive profits due to its Flu Vaccine. What we also know is that Donna Hartlen does have Guillain-Barre syndrome.

In Europe it seems there might even be an investigation into the whole thing.

My problem with the "Swine Flu" is that I do not think it's in the past. I think there is more to come. I'm writing this to hopefully help any future Donna Hartlens.

How can you tell if "Swine Flu" is real threat or not if you are not a microbiologist? Well you cannot know 100%. What you can do however is to make an informed decision.

Here is what I have experienced when I researched the Swine Flu in order to make a decision to get or not to get vaccinated.

Pro Vaccination - Advertising from government and pharmaceutical companies. - Massive media coverage bringing stories of victims such as father describing how his teenage son died in his arms. - Advice of some physicians on TV (however I was not able to get access to my family doctor whom I trust since panic has overwhelmed the clinic he works at).

Against Vaccination - Even previous flu vaccines have known rare side-effects. - The vaccine was produced in the hurry and as such full extent of side-effects could not have been known (same reason they were hesitant to vaccinate pregnant women). - Absolute lack of any concrete usable information on what the outbreak is like, e.g. while I after some digging found some documents listing number of suspected cases in Ontario. I found no comparable documents that would give me an idea how the H1N1 was doing compared to seasonal flu. Basically I wanted to know how many cases there were and what was number of people that died. To get a reference I wanted to see comparable data for regular flu or other diseases. Maybe such information was available but I was not able to find it. What I found was many people as confused as me asking the same questions and then the official media stories which mostly dealt with personal tragedies of the victims.

In the end it was the absence of evidence that was the deal breaker for me, because every good propaganda will contain a lot of strong emotions but very little fact.

I never got my vaccination, I traveled through places such as LAX or Chicago O'Hare airport at the height of the supposed outbreak and never even coughed.

But it's not the past I'm concerned with. As I said I do not think we've seen the end of it. It has happened before Y2K, and given the massive profits made by Glaxo Smith Kline it will happen again.

The best defense against any panic is common sense. What little I do know about humanity is that as long as money could be made by a certain activity. There will always be somebody eager to engage in said activity regardless of any moral implications.

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