Here Comes Avian Influenza! - The Fretters Are Fretting, The Sky Is Falling, And Armageddon Is Nigh

There have been a few reports buried below the fold on the appearance of avian flu in the United States, incidental so far - it has shown up in animals with a rare jump to humans with little consequence, sniffles, aches and pains - but the worriers are already battening down the hatches. 'We've learned our lesson from COVID', they say, 'and this time we are ready'. 

 

Learned what, exactly, and ready how, ask most Americans? Learned to shut down schools and let children lose two years of educational maturity?  Mask them up and deprive them of any facial clues to behavior, further stunting their development?  Shut down small businesses, forcing them into bankruptcy? Create a 'j'accuse culture of neighborhood vigilantism and a hysteria of thousands of maskless Typhoid Marys spreading disease and in the crosshairs of a defiant community?

We didn't learn a thing from the HIV epidemic two decades ago.  A former head of CDC was quoted as saying that this was the first time America treated an epidemic as a political phenomenon. 'Aids Is Everyone's Disease', proclaimed banners, festoons, placards, and lawn signs, when it of course was not.  Its epicenter - the classical epidemiological characterization of where and how a disease begins and how to stop it before it spreads - was ignored.  

Despite the evidence, AIDS, said public health officials, was not a matter of suck-holes in bathhouse walls in the Castro, homosexual promiscuity on the Bay, or the practice of the most infectious sexual practices.  To so identify, define, censure, and isolate such practices and their practitioners would be to again consign a whole, newly liberated sexual minority to the closet.  

However, pretending that these vectors did not exist had two pernicious consequences. First, it allowed the disease to spread beyond what should have been closed borders; and second it created a panic throughout the country.  Billions were spent on warning people against AIDS when the risk in their sexually conservative, modest communities was almost nil. 

 

The gay community of course led the avant-garde and warned the nation of gay roundups, pogroms, Kristallnacht, storm troopers, and concentration camps.  We are not vectors, advocates shouted. We are unfortunate, hapless victims. 

COVID was no different.  It was clear once the earliest data came in that the highest mortality and severe morbidity occurred in the old and the immune-compromised.  Focusing epidemiological efforts on surveilling, isolating, and caring for these groups was clearly the obvious route to containing the virus.  

This of course did not happen, and the disease spread; but because the immunologically sound, the young and healthy would not die from it, the general mortality was less than the last serious epidemic, the Hong Kong flu of 1968, which was treated as any other flu where people got sick and a relatively few died,  Nothing was shut down, the country did not panic, and life went on.

So we have learned nothing from previous influenza epidemics, nothing from COVID, and even less from HIV/AIDS; so what are those who claim we have talking about?

The CDC, Anthony Fauci, and their legions insisted on draconian measures to counteract the Corona virus because they said, 'we don't know...we must wait for the science...caution is the greater part of valor'; but they were being disingenuous at best. If you don't know that children are especially infectious vectors of the virus, you can either wait and see; or shut everything down tight.  Either approach is legitimate, and the former reflects 'science' far more than the latter.  Yet Fauci and his acolytes rejected epidemiology and common sense, and went post office. 

In Sweden restaurants, bars, shops and museums all remained open. Schools were open (though six formers studied from home). Households were allowed to mix and until the end of March there were parties of up to 500 people allowed. Masks were not recommended and people rarely wore them.

Yes, more people in Sweden died than in more controlled Norway, but what about the jobs that were saved and the children who had a better education? Not to mention the levels of debt that were accrued.

A recent study by the Institute of Economic Affairs, University of Buckingham, concluded:

Our results suggest that the Swedish policy of advice and trust in the population to reduce social interactions voluntarily was relatively successful. Sweden combined low excess death rates with relatively small economic costs. In future pandemics, policymakers should rely on empirical evidence rather than panicking and adopting extreme measures. Even if policymakers appeared to act rapidly and decisively, the rushed implementation of strict lockdowns in 2020/21 probably did more harm than good.  

 

Epidemics are not the only cause for such 'rushed implementation' and political decision-making.  A few decades ago, the American breastfeeding lobby argued that only exclusive, long-term breastfeeding was best for women and babies; and yet in so-doing they ignored the legitimate lost opportunity cost of bottle feeding.  Women with the opportunity of higher wages and secure employment - work which required the assistance of a bottle-feeding relative at home - were censured.  

Mixed feeding - breastmilk and bottle - was harshly condemned.  It was all or nothing.  While there is no doubt that exclusive breastfeeding in water-borne disease-ridden countries in Africa could lower infant morbidity and mortality, the opportunity costs and benefits of the bottle were universally ignored. 

The hammering and intimidation about exclusive breastfeeding was never louder than in America, where the risk of disease from bottle feeding is almost zero, where the bottle freed a generation of women from their traditional, limited roles, and where the benefits of breastfeeding, so torturously parsed and exacted, were minor compared to the benefits of bottle freedom. 

There was never compelling epidemiological evidence why exclusive breastfeeding should be America's policy, but it became so because of powerful lobby groups, the tsunami of women-centered policies, and fundamentalist America's unfortunate tendency to favor belief over fact. 

All of which is fair warning for what's coming with Avian influenza.  Panic is likely to set in, and the same risk-ignorant responses that came with COVID are bound to follow. 'But we don't know!' will be the cry to once again turn the country into a gulag. 'The science, the science!' the Chicken Littles will howl; but hopefully with a new Administration and its cautious conservative-minded appointees at the Health Department and CDC, ,government will not repeat the COVID fiasco.