An excellent op-ed piece in the Guardian by Mark Honigsbaum: Swine flu could have been a disaster. Excerpt:
Writing in this paper last week, Tom Sheldon eloquently makes the point that predicting pandemics is a species of risk analysis and thus, by definition, subject to error. With better virological and epidemiological data perhaps the government wouldn’t have stockpiled so much Tamiflu or ordered 90m doses of vaccine. But if it hadn’t and armageddon had occurred, Jenkins would have been the first to call for the guillotining of the Chief Medical Officer.
I do not wish to labour the point but it seems to me that the backlash against swine flu is a species of conspiracy-thinking, one that wilfully misconstrues the role of science in the regulation of technologies of health which have brought so many benefits to society.
In the same way that 9/11 denialists point to the collapse of World Trade Centre 7 to support their wacko theories about “controlled demolitions”, swine flu denialists point to Donald Rumsfeld’s position on the board of Gilead, the company that developed Tamiflu, to argue that the “panic” was got up by similar shadowy neo-conservative corporate interests. It is then a short step to seeing all such panics as conspiracies.
Thus, according to the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the vaccine is really a tool for culling inner-city black populations because of military leaders’ concerns about pressures on the global food supply.
Similar conspiracy-thinking infects health advice websites that advise mothers not to give their children the swine flu jab because of the risk of rare side-effects, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome. In fact, according to the Institute of Medicine, the chances of contracting GBS from influenza vaccination is one or two per million. By comparison, a recent French study found that the risk of contracting GBS from naturally occurring influenza is four to seven out of every 100,000 cases.
But that hasn’t stopped NHS staff, who should know better, from shunning the swine flu vaccine. Nor, I am sorry to say, are such peer-reviewed studies likely to persuade the sort of people who continue to refuse to give their children the MMR vaccine because they once read somewhere that it might be linked to autism.
