Artigo esclarecedor sobre o que está por detrás da pandemia

Just two months of swine flu sniffles, and madness reigns
Scaremongering officials are leading us to lose all sense of proportion and waste resources. People should take an aspirin
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Simon Jenkins
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 July 2009 21.00 BST
Article history

Now we know what happens when Cobra meets nanny state over swine flu. The public realm goes potty and people die.

Ministers meddle, medical officials abuse language, and drug companies make huge profits. And all this is over a condition correctly diagnosed by a Dulwich 12-year-old during the initial outburst of hysteria in May as "like a cold".

Whitehall empire-building has been reduced to a nationalised sniffle.

Last week the government's chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson – never knowingly out-panicked – suffered an acute attack of headline deprivation. Nostalgic for the famous "750,000 could die" prediction for avian flu, he decided that "65,000 people might die" of swine flu. He later said the figure was an "upper estimate scenario for planning purposes". He added that his "lower limit" was 11,000 dead. Donaldson knows his media.

This week he terrorised ministers gathered in Downing Street's Cobra bunker into conceding his dream, a 2,000-strong department for a "national pandemic flu service".

Lord Haw-Haw could not have calibrated a more demoralising panic than the government's health establishment. Some spuriously exact statistic, such as 65,000 or 31% or 0.1, is dressed up with mights, coulds and other pseudo-qualifications.

The head of the Royal College of General Practitioners announces that "at its worse [sic], the pandemic will hit 30% of the population, of whom 0.3% might die". I suppose they might, or perhaps might not.

The death of two pregnant sufferers offered a perfect storm for the panic-merchants and their media acolytes, who duly staged a full MMR-style scare.

Quick as a flash the National Childbirth Trust warned that "symptoms could lead to premature labour or a miscarriage, or even cause birth defects".

Knowing that anything to do with pregnancy causes deep concern, the health secretary, Andy Burnham, went Stalinist.

Pregnant women were told they should not go out, or should go out "carefully" or "only if necessary".

They should see their doctor at once, or phone their doctor, or perhaps avoid their doctor in case they infect others.

In surely the most bizarre ministerial statement in history, Burnham added that British mothers should "plan their pregnancy carefully, but we are not advising women not to conceive … but to think twice".

The mind boggles at the Cobra debate that preceded this conception edict. I can hear an official querying, "How many thoughts should we advise women to have before conception, minister, one, two or three?" Another official was solemnly telling woman to "wash and look after yourself".
Meanwhile, schools are warned they may have to close "to save lives", or perhaps not.

Parents are told not to organise "flu parties".

The public is recommended to get a "flu friend".

The information that 28 out of the 29 "killed so far by swine flu" had other potentially life-threatening conditions was rarely mentioned.

This compares with 6,000 people a year who "die of" normal flu, without ever making the front page or the ministerial dispatch box.

By this Monday, madness ruled.

Supplies of the anti-flu drug Tamiflu were said to be "rolling into the capital in convoys of lorries" to a secret location in Tower Hamlets that was "surrounded by a ring of steel".

The BBC broadcast a warning that the public should not panic, then promptly bought up 4,000 doses for its staff, doubtless on expenses.

A firm called Oxford Economics won cheap publicity claiming that flu "could knock 5%" off gross domestic product.

This was topped by Ernst & Young's Item Club in hysteria mode announcing that "with the western world teetering on the brink of deflation … a pandemic on this scale could tip it over the edge". After such drivel I distinctly saw economists flying alongside Donaldson's pigs.

I have family and friends who have had swine flu, though I doubt if they appear in the figures. Doctors have better things to do than telephone the health department with every cough and splutter.

All the victims found the flu less severe and certainly briefer than a bad cold.

Most confirm that the one thing not to take is Tamiflu.

I do not want to dent the soaring profits of Roche pharmaceuticals, but most I spoke to found the Tamiflu side-effects, of bad dreams, nausea and irritability, far worse than the illness. People should take an aspirin.

In Dread, an analysis of medical scares, the American public health expert, Philip Alcabes, offers the sober warning of the 1976 outbreak of swine flu in America. After immunising 45 million people against a near harmless strain initially compared with the 1918 virus, the federal government had to pay out $93m in compensation for side-effects. Time and again, says Alcabes, scares are used by someone with a vested interest "to incite anxiety or shake loose some funds".

Of course authority has to guard against harm.

But the public is entitled to a sense of proportion.

Untold billions are still being spent on "the risk of terrorism".

Who knows what disproportionate costs have been incurred in what is an almost annual flu scare.
London's accident and emergency services are desperate at the best of times.

I have lost three acquaintances to avoidable hospital-induced infection in the past year. Last week a friend had to wait seven hours after a bicycle accident to have a shattered arm set, by when a simple wound had become complex.

In despair he went private.
These same resources are now being diverted to "await" a flu epidemic.

The government is recruiting 2,000 telephone advisers to answer inquiries from members of the public reduced by the public health apparat to nervous wrecks. This will inevitably suck resources from elsewhere in the health service.

I would like to know how many people will die of heart attacks, meningitis, MRSA and delayed cancer treatment while health politicians play Whitehall games with flu. Many people might indeed die of flu, but they might also die of a nuclear attack, an asteroid strike or a dozen other diseases and accidents now receiving lower priority.

What should scare the public is not flu but the shambles of scaremongering that regularly envelopes it. Suppose Britain were afflicted by a serious disease? A habit of modern government is to generate public dependence by periodic scares. To do this with the nation's health is the politics of fear at its worst.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/oct/21/Whitehall.uk
http://www.philipalcabes.com/

Por cá ainda não tivemos casos suficientes, no entanto entopem as linhas de aconselhamento, que costumam não funcionar ou funcionar mal.

Os senhores da saúde pública habituados aos seus gabinetes também apresentaram números da catástrofe.

Os ingleses parecem que vão ter a vacina em meados de Setembro, quando a gripe estiver em queda, por aqui parece que em Janeiro /Fevereiro, já estará paga?

Conforme está no artigo o estado americano teve que indemnizar muitos por utilizar uma vacina numa situação idêntica que começou com militares, já se precaveu o senado ao provar um impedimento legal de processos cíveis ou criminais no caso desta vacina do sindicato de laboratórios convidados der para o torto.

Mas no fim de tudo quem ficou a ganhar foi e vai ser a Indústria farmacêutica.

Assim, os jornalistas como comem à mão fazem o papel que lhes mandam, os políticos fazem aquilo que há muito sabem fazer: desbaratar o dinheiro que não é deles e dizer asneiras em conferências de imprensa se um porco espirra.

Vergonha é uma palavra a utilizar, sobre quem lucra com estas coisas.