Going back over some articles I wrote in 2009 during the swine flu debacle, I came across this little delight. Enjoy…
How to grow your own demic
First start with a small local health problem, and ignore the environmental factors connected with it. Identify common symptoms and link them to the new problem. Assume that a novel germ is present, because no-one need question that a germ is the cause. It must be, right? Give it a name (the more exotic the better – ‘Abyssinian Serpent Virus’ sounds worse than ‘Home Counties Duvet Day’), and start warning people.
Put in place measures to test and identify suspect cases. Do enough testing to confirm the presence of a new disease as a ‘fact’, releasing figures every day, showing the spread. But then keep availability of testing low, so that no baseline for presence of antibodies etc is established. Then avoid all testing and begin basing all data on the clinical picture, assuming the presence of the new disease whenever symptoms are present, ‘just in case’. Use words like ‘pandemic’, which have no real meaning with regard to severity but sound serious all the same, and get top scientists to release information to a news industry literate mainly in the arts. Cases which would be ignored in any other year, as normal occasional events, suddenly become reported and recorded. Wait for the surge in cases that inevitably happens sooner or later. Then hand out dangerous and under-tested medications like candy, and watch the result.
Whether non-demics result from mass hysteria or conspiracy for any number of reasons, the result is the same; exhausted, frightened people, misdiagnosed and over-medicated, and disruption to services of all kinds. It has to be a numbers game: medicate everybody and millions die. A drug kills a percentage of everyone who takes it; hysteria, exhaustion and disruption to services kills yet more. Some will die of an actual illness; but deaths will mainly be the result of complications, of poor self-mismanagement or of pushing on in times of exhaustion. Nevertheless, they will all be recorded as deaths from the disease. The more are medicated, the more die, hence the bigger the outbreak and the less the requirement for confirmed diagnosis, and the more urgent the desire to medicate. This is the point of ignition.
Once the term ‘pandemic’ is justified, many possibilities become available, such as declaring emergency powers, compulsory mass vaccination, and using terrorism law to lock up people with runny noses; official overreach of all kinds. [At time of writing, 2009] 50 Britons, mostly children, have been held in quarantine in China for over a week after arriving by air; despite no confirmed diagnosis, on the basis of normal symptoms that can affect any traveler after a long journey. The fact that this news made such little impact, when arbitrary detention of British children overseas would normally generate a lot of questions, shows how much leverage is created by such a scenario.
When we are immersed in a situation that is bigger than our own imaginations and beyond our direct perception, we are as unlikely to make sense of it as fish are to understand water; then we cling to our entrenched beliefs, even when the facts don’t quite fit; in this case the unquestioned certainty of viral contagion. Throw in a pinch of fear – synthesised out of conflicting information and just enough uncertainty to make us sense a loss of control. Then you have a population hungry for explanations they can easily cling to, and eager for the reassuring hand of official guidance, however draconian.