B.S. Now Stands for Birdflu Spin

A moment of levity if I may. Not that the following article is funny.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4882358.stm

According to this study, a pandemic could cause a global recession. Yep, that's right. It could be as bad as 1982. Horrors! And the authors of this report base their assumptions on a `worst-case' death toll of between 2 million and 7 million people.

STOP!

That's the most optimistic `worst-case' scenario anyone has considered since I decided to marry my first wife.

Are these guys serious? Do they have any conception of what a `worst case' pandemic would entail? A loss of 2 million people would be the equivilant of the 1968 Hong Kong Flu pandemic, which was so mild, most folks didn't even know we were in a pandemic! The upper limit of their imagination is equivlant to the 1957 Asian flu Pandemic.

Have they totally discounted the virulence of 1918 pandemic? Even taking the lowest death toll proffered, of 20 million people (widely scoffed at today), that would equate to 60 million dead. A far cry from the 7 million `worst case' scenario.

And given that most experts today place the 1918 death toll at between 50 million, and 100 million, a similar outbreak could claim 150 million to 300 million lives.

And no, that's not even a `worst-case' scenario.

That's just the worst we've seen in 100 years.

I could spend the rest of the day tearing apart their conclusions, that the recession would be sharp, but short, but why bother? If it's based on a faulty initial assumption, then the conclusion is unlikely to be worth discussion.

This is another example of `happy talk', that abounds today in the guise of news or serious research. Put it into the same B.S. pile where we toss the news of `breakthrough vaccines just around the corner', and assurances that our governments and health care system will be able to cope.

Opium for the masses. Vague assurances, cooked up by worried investment bankers, health officials, and politicians, designed to make the population blithely unaware of the true impact of a pandemic.

The thing governments, and the powers that be fear the most is panic. They pray each day a pandemic doesn't happen, because they know they can't even begin to deal with it. So they issue watered down assessments, that simply don't sound that bad.

After 9/11, our government said `nobody ever considered that anyone would fly an airliner into a building'. A different sort of B.S. Tom Clancy's best selling novel, Executive Action was based on that exact premise.

Two Days after Katrina, our government said 'nobody anticipated the levees would fail'. Once again, a detailed (and completely accurate) forecast of that happening had appeared in National Geographic Magazine a year earlier. Including the flooding of the 9th ward. As early as 2001, newspapers in New Orleans were carrying `what if' stories about the potential of levee failures.

If the worst-case happens, or even something less than that, you can be sure someone will step forward with a sheepish expression and say, "Nobody thought it would be this bad".

B.S.