Millions of people in the US contracted the H1N1 flu virus aka swine flu. Almost none of those people died.
The WHO and several medical and health organizations in the US believed that H1N1 would be the new super virus which would cause overflowing emergency rooms, worker shortages at companies where people might be home or in a hospital for days, and hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths around the world.
According to The Wall Street Journal, “The government has so far taken delivery of about 111 million doses of vaccine. It has purchased the equivalent of more than 250 million doses.” The additional doses will probably never be used.
Experts in the field of mass psychology will probably look at the panic about the swine flu and the subsequent mildness of the disease as a sign the health organizations overreacted. That, in turn, will cause most people to ignore warnings when the next major mutation of flu viruses begins to spread. And, one year, perhaps in the not very distant future, a really virulent flu will begin to sicken people and kill them in great numbers because false alarms will have blunted potential hysteria.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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