So I've been promising to start posting recaps of my show every week here. Here's the first one, for last Friday, May 1:
The topic was "swine flu, mandatory vaccination, civil liberties, genuine threats and mass hysteria."
I started by asking what, if anything, was different about Swine Flu that warranted the level of "concern" we've been seeing everywhere. I pointed to this article that quotes several epidemiologists, microbiologists, etc., as saying that at the present time it doesn't seem to be any more virulent or any more severe than any other strain of flu and that the only concern is that it could possibly mutate into something more dangerous.
A viewer (Dawn) pointed out that the Swine Flu seems to be killing young healthy adults, rather than the usual victims of flu who tend to be elderly, very young or those with compromised health to start out with. And yes, this does seem to have been the case in Mexico, where the disease first appeared, but not so elsewhere. From what I can see so far, there is no solid reason for fearing this flu any more than any "normal" flu strains.
I then talked about the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, which in case you don't already know about it, is a scary piece of legislation that (some variation of which) has been adopted by 44 states so far. In case you think that this is something only pure civil libertarians oppose, even the ACLU is against it!
Essentially, the Act gives the government power to force medical treatment and vaccination upon the population in the event of a broadly defined "public health emergency." This is very scary stuff for anyone who believes they own their own body and that nobody else has the right to tamper with it. It is doubly frightening for anyone who is skeptical of safety and efficacy of conventional medicine -- and of course even more so for those who know anything about how politicized medical science has become and what some of the more damaging consequences have been.
I did point out that hysteria can flow in many different directions, and that those of us who are concerned about this kind of legislation also need to be wary of the impulse to hysterics and hyperbole -- that what is most important is to be informed and to discern fact from fiction. In that spirit, and without, hopefully, sounding hysterical, I have to say that things like the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act scare me a LOT more than does the Swine Flu.
