Day: 14 Days to go: 351 Word count: 7733
To screw up is human. To cover up, rationalize, justify or otherwise ignore our screw ups is even more human.
I was going to ask the question: when are our public health officials going to admit they screwed up in their overreaction to swine flu, but the answer, of course, is never.
They will claim that it was precisely because of their execution of the pandemic plan that it was not a critical and widespread calamity. Of course to do that, they will have to completely ignore the fact that by the time they got the vaccination rolled out, the season had already peaked. They will also have to ignore the fact that despite the media hysteria and the Public Health Agency of Canada’s (PHAC) massive advertising campaign that fewer than 45% of Canadians have lined up to get their shot (according to PHAC’s own stats as of Jan 6).
And finally, they will have to ignore that the bottom line is this strain of flu was never the threat they made it out to be. In total, through two waves of swine flu, there have been less than 3,000 deaths worldwide. That is fewer than Canada alone experiences every year from the everyday ordinary seasonal flu. And most nations did not have nearly the comprehensive vaccination program we did.
Neverthless, David Butler-Jones, Canada’s top doc, continues to throw good money after bad by flogging the vaccine on TV commericals instead of coming clean and apologizing for the fiasco. This is not my first quibble with Dr. Butler-Jones. As keynote speaker at a media awards ceremony I attended in 2008, he had the nerve to suggest journalists were partners in getting the Health Canada message out. We are not partners with any organization to promote its message. We are, or at least we are supposed to be, an objective lens through which the public can draw its own conclusions.
Neverthless, the doc got his wish in the early days of the vaccination program as virtually every news organization in the country blanketed their respective mediums with wall-to-wall coverage without much investigation of whether it was a significant threat or not.
It is kind of a sad reflection on the credibility of both PHAC and the media that less than half the population bought the hype.
What we did buy, without our consent, was a program MacLeans Magazine estimates will have cost us more than $2 billion by the time the dust settles.
Some people have suggested to me that even if the program saved a handful of lives (which it undoubtedly did) it has been worth it. That is a really nice sentiment, but it flies in the face of our reality, doesn’t it? If that were the case, why do we not invest more heavily in seasonal flu prevention, poverty reduction, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, cancer research, or traffic safety to name just a few things that claim many more lives than swine flu ever will.
And how many lives were lost because, for a couple of months, other aspects of the health system ground to a virtual standstill to accommodate flu clinics? We will probably never know.
What does swine flu have that these others do not? Aside from a scary name (I have to wonder whether any of this would have happened if we called it Teddy Bear Flu), it has not been normalized. We simply accept there will be a certain number of casualties from these other causes.
And now that we have cried wolf and blown the budget, what if something really nasty comes along? Will we be able to mount another response like this and will people take it seriously? Somehow, I doubt it.
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Today I want to add a new feature to Blogging at the Big Dog. It will be my pet peeves section. It won’t be a daily feature, but I will add them as they strike me.
Pet Peeve #1: How advertising is ruining the English language
This is a general complaint I have about the disappearing adverb inspired by an ad in which the announcer suggested people should “eat healthier.” If she were saying, our useless crap is better for your health than our competitor’s useless crap, “healthier” would be appropriate. But since she is modifying the verb “to eat,” we need an adverb not an adjective. “People should eat more healthily.”
Advertisers are not the only guilty parties. Sports announcers are the worst. It seems as if they have never even heard of an adverb despite the fact most are college grads. I have even heard journalists, who really ought to know better, do this on occasion.
Of course, it is understandable that professional wordsmiths would have difficulty with the concept of adverbs and adjectives because it is a Masters level subject. No wait, it’s undergraduate. No, well, at least late high school, right? NO! It is Grade 3. Third grade. We are eight or nine years old when we learn about this stuff. Sheesh!