I'll take my chances

Seems every year now we get some sort of health scare, not just the get your flu jabs kind, but a potential pandemic plague of biblical proportions. It's reached the stage where after the super flu and the bird flu along with swine flu people are just shrugging their shoulders and wondering what all the fuss is about.

Express.

ONLY worldwide mass vaccinations can prevent a possible deadly flu pandemic, experts warned yesterday. People under 50 are at risk of the H2N2 strain – similar to the H1N1 swine flu virus that struck fear across the world in 2009.

Four million people are thought to have died in the last devastating global outbreak of the H2N2 bug in the 1950s and 1960s. A vaccine was produced but the jabs programme was stopped in the late 1960s. It means older people may still be protected but younger people will be at risk because they missed out on the doses. The virus is still present today among birds and swine. Dr Gary Nabel, of the US Vaccine Research Centre in Maryland, said: “Our study suggests people under 50 have little or no immunity.

“Resistance also dramatically increases for those older than 50.” He added: “One approach would be to manufacture the vaccine produced in 1957 and immunise enough of the world’s population to provide ‘herd immunity’ to the rest.”

I probably won't bother, this is of course my choice and I don't have a problem with anyone else getting the jabs, though I'm highly suspicious at the death tolls and scaremongering that has gone on with the various non-existent (it seems) pandemics that  have the various news agencies, doctors and politicians up in arms every year. I'm even at the stage now where I think that these scares are simply a way to try and keep the population living in a state of fear as well as lining the pockets of big drug companies, you can only take so much hype after all and this no longer pushes any buttons of mine, not that it ever has.
Over the years I've become so jaded with various official and MSM announcements about things I should fear that I'm probably in grave danger of risk if something really dangerous comes along, simply because I won't believe them, such has been their effect on my life. I'm not quite at the stage where I'd go out and spot check any politician who tells me the sun will rise in the East, but it's getting close and I'm certainly at the stage where I'd be trying to figure out his angle in telling me. Those in authority and to a certain extent the MSM have by their lies and their general obfuscation and unwillingness to make any statement without various caveats and conditions have lost the confidence and trust of the people they are supposed to be representing. Multi-culturalism, global warming, the EU, immigration, foreign wars, all lied about, all defended to the point of idiocy and still being rammed down our throats as if they are sacred cows to be defended at all costs. It strikes me that in many issues the general public are way ahead of the righteous, certainly in common sense at any rate. Yet at the back of my mind there is the fear that all their machinations might just leave a Pandora's box open one day because we wont believe a word they say which is just another reason to despise them, even if it will be too late.
I'll take my chances with H2N2, I'm over 50 after all, but I am so tired of all the scare stories, the problem is they don't scare any more, they're mostly just sensationalised. So I'll take my chances and just hope that if something really nasty comes along I'll recognise it and do something about it, I'm probably statistically pushing my luck, but I'm definitely not alone.