Name: Fauci Finally, Falsely, Invokes the ‘Spanish Flu’ - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Brand: spectator.org
SKU: spectator-org-258
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Fauci Finally, Falsely, Invokes the ‘Spanish Flu’ - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator | USA News and Politics

preview

MenuFauci Finally, Falsely, Invokes the ‘Spanish Flu’It’s not the first time he’s cried wolf about a disease.Editor's PicksSign up to receiveHot OffThe Pressen years ago I published called “No More Crying ‘Spanish Flu,’ ” in part because with every pandemic or potential pandemic that’s exactly what public health service gurus and the media were doing. And in part because the comparison to the was always ludicrous, based not on science but primal fear.Well, it’s happened again. And this time the klaxon-ringer is no less than the nation’s top health official, National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.Even a virus far more deadly than that of the Spanish flu would not pose a similar threat because of tremendously different conditions then and now.Fauci’s advice and counsel during the coronavirus pandemic to say the least. Most recently, he of New York, the state with the second-highest COVID-19 deaths per capita, .” But he’s never been particularly reliable. In 1983, he made a huge splash with a stating that AIDS could be transmissible through casual contact. Fauci repeated the pattern during successive disease panics, such as when he declared 16 years ago that we’re “” spread of Avian flu H5N1.While Fauci didn’t define “massive,” “even in the best-case scenarios” it would “cause 2 to 7 million deaths” worldwide. British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson (whose prediction of 500,000 coronavirus deaths in Britain and two million in the U.S. would lead to economically ruinous nationwide lockdowns in both countries) to “only” 200,000. As it turned out, the disease worldwide.More recently, Fauci sounded the threat of the Zika virus, in taxpayer funds. It barely touched two U.S. states before burning out on its own.As to his Spanish flu comparison, on Tuesday , “If you look at the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic where anywhere from 50 to 75 to 100 million people globally died (325 to 430 million adjusted to today’s population), that was the mother of all pandemics and truly historic. I hope we don’t even approach that with this, but it does have the makings of, the possibility of … approaching that in seriousness.”Granted, he’s still ahead of CDC Director Robert Redfield, who has already that coronavirus is worse than the Spanish flu. But that may not be saying much.We already know that COVID-19 has a far lower mortality rate than even lesser 20th-century flu pandemics. The CDC’s “best estimate”&nbsp;. That compares to about 0.67 percent for the&nbsp; “, which in turn was vastly milder than Spanish flu.Further, even a virus far more deadly than that of the Spanish flu would not pose a similar threat because of tremendously different conditions then and now.In 1918, the world was at war. In part because of that, people were in far poorer general health than we are today, with malnourishment commonplace. We know malnourishment is a powerful factor in infectious disease severity. Apparently of Irish people who died during the great potato famine of 1845–50 actually starved, with the .Far from “social distancing,” soldiers were packed like veritable sardines in barracks, box cars, ships, and trenches. The of the disease, curiously associated with Spain, was actually in the crowded environs of Fort Riley, Kansas.Back then, medicine was not so advanced as it is today: “The arsenal of available medical countermeasures to treat pandemic influenza virus infections in 1918 was quite basic and largely limited to supportive care,” . Common “treatments” included aspirin, fresh air, and sunshine.We’ve come a long way. Among other things, we’ve developed flu vaccines, pneumonia vaccines, and pulmonary intubation. There were no effective antivirals , and, rather amazingly, even use of IV tubes for hydration, nourishment, and continuous medicine injection wasn’t common in the U.S.Unfortunately, development of new medicines remains agonizingly slow compared to, say, incredible advances with electronics. So despite , don’t expect any miracles in the near future.But in the last century we’ve certainly done a lot of pharmaceutical shelf-stocking, and there’s nothing a pharma company loves more than getting new tricks out of old drugs. Thus one such, the steroid dexamethasone, and thus more effective for coronavirus patients, while another, , appears to at least shorten coronavirus hospital stays .Although there are about and some (usually the final phase) of testing, it shouldn’t be we’ll shortly have one that’s both safe and reasonably effective shortly. So it would be questionable to base policies on that assumption. But advances in the studies of virology, immunology, and computing power, especially artificial intelligence, mean we can probably expect such a vaccine in record time.And this is rather important: There were no antibiotics in 1918–19, and,&nbsp;, “The majority of deaths in the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory-tract bacteria.” The chief researcher for that paper?Dr. Anthony Fauci.Michael Fumento () is an author and journalist who has specialized in writing on epidemics for 35 years.Please enable JavaScript to view theSign up to receiveThe offer renews after one year at the regular price of $79.99.

MenuFauci Finally, Falsely, Invokes the ‘Spanish Flu’It’s not the first time he’s cried wolf about a disease.Editor's PicksSign up to receiveHot OffThe Pressen years ago I published called “No More Crying ‘Spanish Flu,’ ” in part because with every pandemic or potential pandemic that’s exactly what public health service gurus and the media were doing. And in part because the comparison to the was always ludicrous, based not on science but primal fear.Well, it’s happened again. And this time the klaxon-ringer is no less than the nation’s top health official, National Institutes of Allergies...

Fauci Finally, Falsely, Invokes the ‘Spanish Flu’ - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator | USA News and Politics

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS