the WHO fucked up on the Swine Flu pandemic, and so it's a Big Pharma shill!

[SheilaT]

16. I'm guessing 1912 is a typo. It was 1918.

While that was a virulent strain, there were social conditions that greatly exacerbated its impact. The lack of handwashing. The crowding together of young men who'd never been off the farm. And, as already mentioned, the continued sending overseas of young men who had been exposed to this flu while still in camp. It was the perfect way to spread that flu.

And, as you seem to be aware, most people over the age of 50 had been through a previous type A flu epidemic a half century before (type A flu is the most virulent of the three types, A, B, and C, and not all A types are swine flu) and therefore were largely immune. That's why so few elderly even got it, let alone died.

Getting flu tends to confer a life-long immunity, as does getting smallpox.

But back to my point. One soldier had gotten the swine flu in 1976. One. That was not cause to start what amounted to a panic in the population. I lived in Washington DC at that time, and I did not get a vaccine, because early on it was clear to me that it was being handled all wrong.

The real issue these days is that there are rather large numbers of people who are immuno-compromised for various reasons, for whom otherwise relatively benign illnesses can be deadly. Those kinds of people didn't exist not too many years ago, and they lend a particular sensitivity to the entire concept of herd immunity.