Apocalypse Postponed (Again)

The Stand (everyone dies from flu): Fiction

Apparently swine flu is "a much milder virus" than previously thought. Really, though? You don't say.

I thought the worldwide healthscare professional industry wouldn't have given up quite so easily. This thing must be less threatening than a baked bean fart. But the pharmaceutical companies will be happy because they have sold hundreds of millions of doses of flu palliatives (like Tamiflu) and had umpteen hours of free, indirect advertising.

Meanwhile the government is happy because it's been able to (try to) deflect attention from its own total incompetence and waste vast sums of taxpayer cash it no longer has. Cost of leafleting every house in the country? Well, no one anywhere has reported it - or the cost of 33 million face masks (remember, the ones that only work for healthscare professionals because they are a different species of human being).

Even if we forget about the cost of printing the leaflet and just take a conservative number for postage through Royal Mail bulk services, you are left with a bill of roughly £5 million. With printing costs this is invariably much higher. Thirty-three million face masks? Well, a correct standard of mask costs between £4 and £5. Allow a (generous) saving per unit for a bulk purchase order of, say, 40% and you are left with a cost to the taxpayer of between £79 and £90 million. For face masks that no one will wear (at least to protect them from a non-malicious flu virus that just wants to be friends).

Poverty in Mexico: Fact

Total cost? My upper, but still very conservative, estimate is about £100 million - for 27 not-very-sick people. 27.

Now that's how to waste money.

Next time, WHO healthscare professionals, you find out what really happened to the poor bloody Mexicans living in abject squalour in their animals' shit with no money, no health care provision and no official interest in their suffering, who died. Because it seems, idiots, that what these people died from was poverty, not flu. Flu was a symptom of their poverty.

And after our God awful government has just pissed away another few squillions for a few sniffles, that sort of makes me rather mad. That hundred million (assuming it was not pissed away by an equally incompetent Mexican government) could have been put to good use. It could pay for 10 magnificent free health centres in Mexico City, for instance. Or five new schools here, if you don't feel like helping the world's poor.

Finally, with clockwork predictability, of course the Arab-Egyptians have seized on this opportunity to launch a jihad against pigs (yes, the animals) in their own country. That's 300,000 healthy animals being slaughtered for nothing. Well, not quite.

In reality, it is merely a bigoted crackdown on the Christian minority of Copts. You know how it goes: "Mohammed said pigs were dirty and look, he was right. And Christians are dirty. So let's kill them all." "The Christians?" "Hmmm. Er, no. No. Better not. Just the pigs." "Will do, boss."

That's what a 'health scare' can do to the ignorant. That's why causing one is criminally stupid.

'We're innocent!'

And all the while the poor, innocent, healthy pigs are caught up in the middle. No animal rights groups have batted an eyelid about this. No noise, also, from the Left media or Labour's Foreign Office about the crackdown on Christians in Egypt. Why?

Because they are bigots and hypocrites, too. Didn't you know that?

Spectator Sport

Alex Massie of The Spectator has just blogged:

Swine Flu Fever

If they can panic in Washington DC, then, for heavens' sake, we can have some hysteria here too:

The first Britons confirmed to have caught swine flu have been discharged from hospital after recovering.

This will obviously disappoint the BBC, who've been hoping that Swine flu will make up for the great disappointment that was bird flu's failure to bump us all off. Still, this news, while obviously a setback, won't be enough to stop them from telling us that we're all going to die next week.

Are they finally catching-on, do you think?

++Update++
Well, the answer is a resounding 'no!'. Massie was absolutely correct in his prediction that the BBC would drain as much drama out of this nonsense as possible. Newsnight, part of the televisual arm of Downing St. Media Services, has led with it, saying exactly what the government wants it to say.

They're trotting out bucketloads of healthscare professionals, of whom there is an apparently endless supply, to give a bit more impetus to the panic. Chief Medical Loony, Liam Donaldson, is also on hand to launch yet another full scale attack on common sense, lest there be an outbreak of that increasingly rare thought disease somewhere in the country. Heaven forbid!

++Update 2++
Now it's top topic on Question Time. Remember, folks: eight people are feeling poorly. Eight. And now honorary healthscare specialist Hillary Benn is telling people how to use tissues.
I give up. If people are that bloody stupid they deserve to get Ebola.

Health Scare Professionals

And, by God, they're good at what they do.

As WHO cranks-up the drama to a Level 5 panic, once more the scale of the actual sickness fails miserably to keep pace with perfectly matches the scale of government displacement activity (GDA). A standard, full-scale GDA response has been triggered by the Chief Medical Loony Officer: Scot, Liam Donaldson.

Orders for millions of doses of expensive anti-common sense vaccines have been placed as a contingency against localised outbreaks of rational thought, and millions more German surgical masks have been ordered to head-off any shortfall in expenditure from the extra-special Mandatory Money-Wasting Budget. These masks are only to be worn by the hundreds of thousands of accredited health scare professionals. "It's more than just a uniform thing," according to Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Spokesman for Health Scares, "they only work for frontline health scare staff, because health scare professionals are, in fact, a different species of human being altogether, I'm reliably informed."

Special action, made possible by new laws now available to GDA officials under the Plan to Avoid Natural Incredulity and Common Sense (PANICS) legislation (2006), is to be taken against (soon-to-be) discredited journalist Simon Jenkins for this dangerously level-headed article in a major national newspaper today. He wrote:

Epidemiologists love the word "could" because it can always assure them of a headline. During the avian flu mania, Canada geese were treated like Goering's bombers. RSPB workers were issued with protective headgear.The media went berserk, with interviewers asking why the government did not close all schools "to prevent up to 50,000 deaths". The Today programme's John Humphrys became frantic when a dead goose flopped down on an isolated Scottish beach and a hapless local official refused to confirm the BBC's hysteria. The bird might pose no threat to Scotland, but how dare he deny London journalists a good panic?

Meanwhile a real pestilence, MRSA and C difficile, was taking hold in hospitals. It was suppressed by the medical profession because it appeared that they themselves might be to blame. These diseases have played a role in thousands of deaths in British hospitals - the former a reported 1,652 and the latter 8,324 in 2007 alone. Like deaths from alcoholism, we have come to regard hospital-induced infection as an accident of life, a hazard to which we have subconsciously adjusted.

This appalling complacency in the face of a threat that could mean the end of all human and pig life as we know it will not go unpunished. GDA has already issued an order for Mr Jenkins' removal from the Prime Minister's Christmas card list. However, it was decided that some leniency be afforded Jenkins in acknowledgment of his decision not to include in his scurrilous report the irrelevant facts that 250 million people suffered and one million people died from Malaria last year alone, thanks mainly to the entirely logical decision taken by top WHO Health Scare Professionals to advise countries recently not to use DDT to combat this disease, stating that it was "very much concerned with health consequences from the use of DDT".

A WHO insider claimed, sensibly: "Well, new types of effective DDT are extremely expensive to research, develop and distribute and malaria victims are only poor bastards who're gonna die from something else anyway, so why bother? If they were Americans or even Brits, of course - well, that's a different matter altogether, isn't it? "

Jenkins' outbursts concerning other officially ignored infections...

MRSA and C difficile are not like swine flu, an opportunity for public figures to scare and posture and spend money. They are diseases for which the government is to blame. They claim no headlines and no Cobra priority. Their sufferers must crawl away and die in silence.

were roundly condemned by the official spokeman for the Department of Government Displacement Activities as 'unnecessary and wholely unfounded scare-mongering from a dangerously level-headed, non-Health Scare Professional.

'Mr Jenkins should get his priorities right,' she added.

==Stop Press==
"The Daily Mash is next on our list of swine flu apocalypse deniers to be silenced," the spokesman mumbled, apparently in what she thought was an inaudible afterthought.