We got a lot of vaccines we gotta sell and this IS an impulse buy.

You don't WANNA DIE?

Do you?

Line right up to get your flu shots.

BOO!

Alas, there was another virulent contagion missing from America in 1976, i.e., the plague of Republicanism, spread by an ignorant, lazy herd of bovine half-wits wallowing in the toilet of Republican talk radio. A disease that would surely cause those afflicted to welcome the deaths of thousands Americans in the hopes of discrediting the President of the United States, just as they now spend their days dreaming of teabagging Dick Cheney and salivating over the prospect of another 9/11 attack.

Stock up 80 percent!!!

I got the swine flu shot in 1980 at Ft Gordon Georgia while in the Army.

It put me and hundreds in the hospital with a high fever and bloody throat.

It Sucked.

Want to know more about how this swine flu has come about? Try these two web sites...you'll be sickened for sure....something the American corporate protectionist press will not cover....

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-25-swine-flu-smithfield/

and this Dec. 14 2006 Rolling Stone expose' will let you connect the dots...as well as showing you just how toxic these pig sh!t pools are...people have jumped in after others who have fallen in and they all die. This has happened a number of times...literally dying of Pig sh!t. People who live around these pools often get sick from the stench and the ground water pollution. Maybe now, were all going to die of pig sh!t-related Swine flu. They have polluted the ground water and the air...fertilize plants with the chemical laced toxic pig sh!t pools. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters

I hope Luter falls into one of his own pig sh!t ponds. Even back in 2006 he was going into Poland and other places in Europe and other countries and doing the same things there as he has done in the US..ie: monopolize, chemicalize, and pollute. As the first article will tell you...this Swine flu started at, or near, the Mexican Smithfield operations.

This disease resulted from college students going to Mexico on spring break, who couldn't come up with the cash for the local prostitutes. You don't need to go to flying saucer theories to find any other way pig DNA could combine with human DNA.

Sounds like you are speaking from experience. Have you read the articles I mentioned? Nothing about flying saucers...all very down to earth. But we know where your mind soars, don't we? You must be a Kansas farm boy, huh?

This is like saying "Hey, I've run this light before and nothing bad happened, so I'm going to run it again". We already know that this disease 1) is passed from person to person and 2) can be fatal to many who get it. That is very different from the 1976 swine flu, based on what you wrote in this article. Panic is always bad, but let's not go the other direction and pretend that there is nothing bad happening. This may or may not be "the big one", but we're better off assuming the worst and hoping for the best than vice versa.

There are surely lessons to be heeded from the 1976 Swine Flu debacle, but it really is problematic that this article didn't point out the glaring differences from an infectious disease perspective.

In 1976, one person died and the flu's spread was limited to a single local community. In 2009, we face a situation where 100s of people have already died and the spread appears to already be in multiple countries. This is a far more serious situation and one that remains highly uncertain, changing day by day. It will be almost impossible for governments to find the right line between caution and action here because to do nothing could result in a massive human tragedy (if the virus has the 7% fatality rate as it has demonstrated in Mexico) and yet to do too much could be embarrassing and damaging (if the virus quickly mutates into a weaker strain). We expect a lot from governments in these situations, but it's a gamble, pure and simple. No one actually knows what this virus will do.

...and I think that was the only winter of my childhood I DIDN'T get some respiratory ailment, followed by pneumonia. Then again, it was also the only winter I was immunized on the matter.

I think that the point of the article isn't that we should ignore the situation because of the past, but not allow interested parties to panic us and then force others toward uncessessary actions because of our panic. Ford really had every reason to sound the alarm...I'm thinking that he didn't think that he knew more about flu than viriologists and when the outbreak first occurred, he listened to them. The problem was that when it became apparrent that it was not a plague destined to kill millions, they went through with a rushed vaccine for political reasons.

There is a lot we don't know right now. Unfortunately, we feel that we need to know instantaneously and there will be people who will let us connect the dots. We don't know, for instance, what the mortality rate is. We don't even know if all of those deaths in Mexico are swine flu related (they are reported, not confirmed), how many of those sick people have this flu or something similar. Since the cases in the U.S. have been mild, there are probably more than a few cases in Mexico where a lot of people in Mexico who felt a little under the weather and didn't go to the doctor. We know about the reported deaths because it is hard not to notice the dead, but at the beginning of an outbreak, mild cases of the disease are under reported. But because we don't know, someone here did the math of the reported cases to reported deaths and came up with a 7% mortality rate...which is unbearably high, almost unbelievably so. It's numbers like that, generalized to fill gaps in knowlege that will lead to an outcome like 1976.

There will be many people connecting dots as that is what people do. We do know a lot more about viruses than we did in 1976 so we should be able to develop a vaccine more quickly. Unfortunately, none of that knowledge will do us any good if we allow someone to step in with a politically expedient fix. Unfortunately, I don't think our media and political culture have evolved since 1976. Somehow, someone on the right is going to make certain that any bungling on this matter will be seen as worse than the response to hurricane Katrina so that Obama won't recieve credit, and some yahoo on the left will point out that any bumgling of the matter is caused by a broken system left by the Bush administration.

At this point, I'm inclined to listen to CDC doctors who are working on the problem, not experts hired to be interviewed and give sound bites on CNN who aren't doctors or who haven't worked on this situation and know just as much as the rest of us about what is going on. Willing to look "slow" to get the science done is going to be one of the struggles for this administration.