I remember a cartoon from Bloom County or Outland a long time. Ronald Ann (pictured to the left, the adorable little scamp) was talking about how sometimes she felt frightened and scared at the sheer size of the earth, at the almost overwhelming nature of problems that were out there, and how small she felt in the face of it. And at those moments late at night when these fears would hit her, she would slip quietly downstairs and watch Morton Downey Jr. to see people even littler than herself. Right now I kind of feel like that, having just read this HuffPo article about how the World Health Organization obviously faked the Swine Flu.
Partly, though, I must admit that I’m impressed with my overall brilliance. Some time ago I wrote a post here comparing the Y2K bug and the Swine Flu, and I called this reaction. Still, as much as I saw it coming, I still have the capacity to be let down when the stupid folk bring my cynical prophecies to fruition.
The World Health Organization has released a rebuttal to this¬†which I think very clearly responds to the allegations, and there’s a great look on this by one of the Reveres over at Effect Measure. Still, being a prick with a blog, I felt the need to comment.
For starters, let me say that there is nothing wrong with questioning the motives of the WHO. Questioning things is good. I babbled about that yesterday. However, blindly attacking is not the same as asking questions. And being a dick about it just makes matters worse. If we lived in a world where people were not so quick to take whatever alternative viewpoint gets thrown their way as gospel, this sort of thing wouldn’t bother me so much. But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where people think we lied about landing on the moon, that black people are the descendants of Lucifer’s demon army, and that bananas prove the existence of a creator, but pineapples in no way refute this.
Folks, there was a flu. It was real. I caught it and missed five days of work. My youngest son wound up in the hospital because of it. Several people died from it, or from secondary infections, and many people wound up having a really crappy time fighting it off. And yes, it wasn’t as big as we thought it would be.
Only that’s wrong. Epidemiologists didn’t think it would be anything, they thought it could be something significant. Could and would are very different words. It had all the hallmarks of what could have been a really serious problem. It is a highly infectious strain of flu. It set the stage for significant problems with secondary infections. It was not a strain of flu that the majority of the public had any naturally occurring antibodies for. It targeted an unusual segment of the population.
As a society, we put a lot of emphasis on being forward thinking and preparing for the worst. We save for rainy days. It’s a good thing. But when the rain didn’t come, we felt ripped off. Hurricane Katrina was a far worse disaster than it could have been had we been forward thinking. If they had fixed the dykes before the storm hit, things would have been better. We know this. But what if we fixed the dykes and there was no storm? Was that a waste? Of course not. When the WHO saw what could happen with this virus, they put together a plan and acted on it. The fact that things weren’t as bad as they could have been is neither their fault nor a bad thing.
Yes, the drug companies made bank on this. They are companies. They manufacture and sell products. Being angry about this is like being angry at a grocery store for selling food at a markup. The drug companies have massive budgets to work with, and that’s a good thing. If we were trying to manufacture vaccines with no profit motive with nothing but a bunch of little companies, we’d have been screwed. I’m not saying that all they do is good, far from it. But a vaccine was needed, it had to be tested, it had to be mass produced, and it had to be dispersed to a geographically diverse population. I for one am bloody glad they were able to make it happen as quickly as they did.
Public outcry against a group like WHO over something like this will have only one possible end result. It will weaken the reaction next time. Plain and simple, we’re cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Jim
