Even Toronto health care workers couldn’t be stampeded into getting the shots. Only 60% of them bothered.
Barbara Yaffe, head of communicable disease control for the Toronto Board of Health, proclaimed herself reasonably satisfied with the public’s response. But how can she be? Given the $1-billion+ spent by Ottawa on the swine flu hysteria (which probably climbs to $2 billion or more when provincial and municipal campaigns are added in), a 28% vaccination rate is awful if your aim is to have as many people immunized as possible. The 35% rate most winters is achieved at a fraction of the expense and public calamity.
So hear, hear to those who resisted the madness that was the Great 2009-10 Swine Flu Pandemic.
Even from the start, the World Health Organization and other experts where told this strain of flu was weak and easily defeated. Infection rates never came remotely close to forecasts and death tolls were thankfully much, much lower than for typical seasonal infections.
The trouble, I think, was that so many public health officials have predicted so many pandemics for so long — SARS, bird flu, swine flu — that they simply got caught up in their own warnings and projections. They wouldn’t listen to contrary evidence.
Science writer Michael Fumento has an excellent summary in Forbes this week of just what a fizzle the swine flu was: 18,000 deaths worldwide versus the 250,000 to 500,000 the WHO reports happen in an average year. It would obviously be better if there were no deaths at all, but that low figure is cause for rejoicing.
It is also yet another example of experts crying “wolf!” If they don’t stop soon, the public will stop listening to experts altogether.
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