Mixed Message

Let me just state at the outset that I've come to the point in which I don't trust ANYTHING our government says. If the president -- any of 'em -- came on television to announce the sky is blue, I would immediately assume it was any color BUT blue. It seems that almost any announcement or pronouncement is drenched in spin, half-truths and, often, downright dishonesty.

This is a lead-in to a report released by the White House yesterday. Here's the story from The Washington Post.

Government health officials are urging people not to panic over estimates of 90,000 people dying of swine flu this fall.

"Everything we've seen in the U.S. and everything we've seen around the world suggests we won't see that kind of number if the virus doesn't change," Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a C-SPAN interview taped Wednesday.

On Monday the White House released a report from a group of presidential advisers that included a scenario in which as much as half the population could catch the H1N1 virus, and death possibilities ranged from 30,000 to 90,000.

"We don't think that's the most likely scenario," CDC flu specialist Anne Schuchat said of the presidential advisers' high-end tally. What is likely: A busy flu season that starts earlier than usual, Schuchat told the Associated Press.

The H1N1 virus so far has been no more deadly than the flu strains seen every fall and winter. And close genetic tracking of the new virus as it circled the globe in the past five months has shown no sign that it is mutating to become more virulent.

If all the evidence collected to date indicates that the swine flu is no more virulent than the typical annual flu, why release a report that is bound to frighten a good deal of the public? What purpose could be afoot in this situation?

I'm sure we all remember the Bush administration releasing their rainbow-colored security alerts. Time and time again we were informed that the level had risen (danger Will Robinson, danger Will Robinson), but we were to go on about our business as if there was nothing to worry about. And, of course, these kinds of mixed messages worked just as the Bush team wanted: People were so busy fretting over imminent "terrorist" attacks that few people noticed what was really going on behind the curtain.

Now Bush is gone and we have our brand new charismatic president. Yet, I see the same kind of shenanigans going on here. My guess is that the Obama White House wants to get everybody worried about the swine flu so that we don't pay close attention to the hatchet job being done on health care reform!

Let's see if the mainstream media performs its part of the act -- mindless hours and hours of programming spent analyzing the swine flu up one side and down the other. Experts engaged in endless debates. Pie charts. Graphics. Extra-special reports.

Really. If you genuinely don't want to get people worked up, a report like this would never have been released.