Well, to me it never looked threatening, despite Vice President Biden’s over publicized warning to his family. I follow a simple rule: when the media unanimously tells me to hate someone or to fear something, they are lying.
I wonder if it officially became “less threatening” before or after our government agreed to purchase millions of vaccines.
im sorry, but i think you have to give credit where credit is due, and the govt is in an impossible situation with something like this that is a totally new strain, and where there is such scary but unreliable data coming out of the source country. Obama was pretty clear in saying that it was cause for concern but not alarm, which is is absolutely true. The best way to prevent widespread infection and death without overly coercive procedures is to give people as much information as possible about low cost/energy self-protection –as much as it pains me to see the pres or napolitano make announcements about coughing into your hand or whatever, it just so happens we lack a surg general right now, so there arent many other options. I think people are seeing a lot more alarmism in the govt and even at times the medias reaction to this than there has been – the fact is, the initial info that came out of mexico was really alarming, and if it had turned out to be a deadlier strain, we would be crying about the govt not taking the easy early steps and waiting until drastic steps were necessary. Im not going to be mad that Biden said one stupid thing about taking public transport, when the fact is, social distancing is like the least intrusive, easiest way for people to prevent the spread of disease while not living in a total bubble – towns that implemented these practices during the spanish flu apprently suffered for lower infection rates…
as for the vaccine thing – im not a huge fan of pumping money in vaccinations that can often be ineffective. But, Ive had somehwat come around to the wisdom of working to try to develop a vaccine for this strain asap… if it turns out that the death in mexico are resulting from cytokine storms, then the mildness we are seeing in other regions may be just the first wave of the virus, and the real dangerous time will be the second wave once peoples immune systems are senstised. however, the real answer to why it looks less threatening now is that theyve sequenced it and looked at the surface proteins and neither of those indicate a particularly dangerous strain.
Thanks for the post. Are you saying the G-men aren’t coming to get me and I should but my rifle back in its case?
I’ll be curious to hear your reaction to tomorrow’s many posts about swine flu, eugenics and population control. I’m writing them now.
I don’t know if I mentioned this to you before, but my dad’s company has been working on a vaccine for Swine Flu since last winter. Odd. I have informed him of his flawed business model, where they have started the panic, without having the “magic pill” available. Anyways, I am with you on not freaking out seeing as how the spread of this has been really slow considering it’s taking place in such an enormous and densely populated city. Plus, the symptoms aren’t anything scary either, it’s not exactly the T-Virus.