Swine Flu Deaths Soar Past Bear Attacks

The second swine flu death in the US was confirmed today, in Texas, where the first death occurred which really wasn’t an American death since it was a Mexican who crossed the border and happened to die in Houston. And the true numbers of deaths are unclear, with the original reports of 150 deaths in Mexico being ratcheted down as now only about 20 deaths or so are actually confirmed as swine flu. The 36,000 deaths per year trotted out every year by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) here in my hometown of Atlanta, GA, are of course a lie, meant to instill paranoia and justify why we are paying for all of these people at the CDC to protect us from this big bogeyman. It is estimated that less than half of those people actually die from the flu, and that the others are usually very elderly who were immucompromised or on their way out from natural causes anyway. And the hand wringing about so many young people dying in Mexico? Well there aren’t that many actually confirmed deaths now that collective officials stopped letting their heads spin around on their necks and started actually looking at the data.

Fact is, that the swine flu contains elements that have been seen in previous versions of the flu, thus there is some immunity already built in in the population. And if you multiply the 403 confirmed cases in the US in the first month of the presence of the virus times 12 months you get a much smaller number than the hundreds of thousands that get conventional flu, and a much lower death rate! Everybody freaked out about the bird flu, but as I have said repeatedly over the past two years, if it mutated from an H5 version so that it could be transmitted to humans it would probably be less deadly.

But that doesn’t stop Richard Besser MD, acting head of the CDC, Janet Napolitano, head of Homeland Security (doesn’t that title give you the chills?) and Margaret Chan PhD, head of the World Health Organization (whom my blogger friend Rick Lippin MD recently called on to resign given her fear mongering in elevating the pandemic rating to Phase 5) from continuing to stir up fear and paranoia in the interest of keeping the public “informed”. I mean after all if there is no world wide catastrophe (as there won’t be) they can always just say better safe than sorry.

But anyhoo since we now have two deaths, that means that swine flu jumps ahead of bear attacks as a cause of mortality in the US. That is if you live in Alaska. Since only one person dies from bear attack every other year and that is usually in Alaska. They have whole magazines about it.

Deaths from swine flu surge past bear attacks

The more interesting question is when the musical chairs are gonna stop and everyone is gonna realize that this is all just one big bs media debacle. Alas, we can always claim that we have to wait until the fall when the ‘big one’ pandemic hits big time.

I’m sure former CDC Director Julie Geberding is glad that she resigned when she did. It was one of those political fall on your swords things, like she was a Bush girl and now time to go. But lets not dwell on many of the CDC trip ups of her reign, like ignoring the fact that the formaldihyde in trailers of Hurricane Katrina was making people sick, or ignoring Hurricane Katrina for that matter, or allowing her report on global warming to be edited by the Bush White House, or distorting research data on obesity to get more funding for her agency, or lying about the case of Andrew Speaker who was trumped up as a drug resistant XDR TB case (he wasn’t) which came about as part of the CDC strategy to get more funding by publicizing XDR TB as reported in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, or distorting obesity research findings for same purpose, or causing massive numbers of competent and respected scientists to leave CDC for her politicies and decisions, etc etc. So she is now riding into the sunset. Bye the bye, Julie.

Goodbye, Julie. Thank you for your years of "leadership" at CDC. You will not be missed.

 See you.. in September…