ABC News: Non-Existant Flu Epidemic <em>As</em> Bad As Nuclear Holocaust

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Tuesday, November 01, 2005

ABC News: Non-Existant Flu Epidemic As Bad As Nuclear Holocaust

By Rob on November 1, 2005 at 02:12 pm

5 Comments

Is it just me, or is the media getting a little carried away with this bird flu thing:

Bird Flue Nuclear Holocaust

I understand how serious this the threat of the bird flu is and how important it is to prepare ourselves for an outbreak, but comparing it to nuclear war?

C'mon. Since 2003 there have been 60 deaths from bird flu, all in Asian countries and all people who came into direct contact with sick birds. There is a chance, a chance, that the bird flu might mutate into a strain capable of infecting humans. That's something to take seriously, but there's no use inciting panic.

This is just plain irresponsible journalism.

Comments

Rob, I am really disappointed with you. Don’t you know that to make something a scandal, you have to make it a crisis first? Of course the media had to declare a crisis. That way they will then be able to create questionable statistics to bludgeon the President with. Once they have done that, they can then move on to why the President didn’t take action sooner to prevent something that didn’t happen in the first place.

You don’t know much about how the media interacts with government do you?

Steve L. on November 2, 2005 at 07:11 am

Steve L. wrote:

Of course the media had to declare a crisis.

Are you sure it’s the media who’s calling this a crisis?

From the article:

There is no bird flu pandemic now, but President Bush said today America needs to start preparing for one.

“If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare, and one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we failed to act today,” Bush said.

(...)The draft of Bush’s report predicts as many as 200 million Americans would be infected and 200,000 Americans would die.

Dave on November 2, 2005 at 07:11 am

In the light of Dave’s comments, perhaps Rob should change

“This is just plain irresponsible journalism”

“This is accurate reporting of an irresponsible presidential report”?

Mark on November 2, 2005 at 08:11 am

Mark wrote:

In the light of Dave’s comments, perhaps Rob should change

“This is just plain irresponsible journalism”

to

“This is accurate reporting of an irresponsible presidential report”?

Yeah… that’ll happen soon.

Dave on November 2, 2005 at 12:11 pm

Rob
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I’ve changed posts when I’ve been proven wrong. Mark can attest to that. No need to be a little dickhead about it.

And Mark, you might have a point if Dave hadn’t cherry-picked a few quotes out of the President’s speech on the matter. If you read the whole thing his message is clear: Bird flu is not an imminent threat, but it is something to take seriously and we should prepare for it.

That is not exactly like comparing the flu to nuclear holocaust.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

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