{"id":3422,"date":"2010-04-15T09:04:24","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T13:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=3422"},"modified":"2010-04-15T10:12:28","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T14:12:28","slug":"wolf-wolf-wolf-oh-never-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/04\/15\/wolf-wolf-wolf-oh-never-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"“Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Oh, never mind . . .”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marni Soupcoff<\/a> points out that the World Health Organization should have been far<\/em> more forthcoming after their intial “the sky is falling” announcements caused panic last year over H1N1:<\/p>\n

\n

Admit your mistakes before others exaggerate them. That\u2019s the oft-quoted wry advice of writer and retired surgeon Dr. Andrew V. Mason. Perhaps the World Health Organization (WHO) was trying to follow it this week by convening a three-day meeting of outside experts to review the organization\u2019s handling of the recent swine flu outbreak. The problem is, despite claiming to want to know what went wrong as much as what went right, the WHO seems unwilling to even entertain the possibility that it created a counterproductive panic by labelling H1N1 a pandemic of the highest order (\u201clevel 6\u201d).<\/p>\n

Swine flu, as you\u2019ve probably realized by now, has turned out to be a mild, not particularly deadly virus — it\u2019s certainly far less deadly than the regular seasonal flu that most of us consider a mundane part of everyday life. If one were feeling charitable toward the WHO, one could point out that it didn\u2019t know back in the spring of last year — when it shouted \u201clevel 6!\u201d from the rooftops — that H1N1 would prove to be such a relatively innocuous bug. But it\u2019s precisely because it didn\u2019t know that the WHO should have been more cautious with its labelling. You don\u2019t shout \u201cfire\u201d in a crowded theatre just because it smells like the popcorn might be a little on the burnt side. It\u2019s not worth the chaos and alarm you might cause. (Or in this case, the run on vaccines and the resorting to quacks and sketchy \u201chome\u201d remedies.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Between the unrestrained use of the term “pandemic” and the noted ability of the mass media to hype real and imagined risks, it’s almost surprising we didn’t have doomsday-style cults spring up over H1N1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marni Soupcoff points out that the World Health Organization should have been far more forthcoming after their intial “the sky is falling” announcements caused panic last year over H1N1: Admit your mistakes before others exaggerate them. That\u2019s the oft-quoted wry advice of writer and retired surgeon Dr. Andrew V. Mason. Perhaps the World Health Organization […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,66,28],"tags":[86,156,538,243,539,537],"class_list":["post-3422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-health-science","category-media","tag-criticism","tag-fail","tag-influenza","tag-medicine","tag-pandemic","tag-who"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-Tc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3422"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3424,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422\/revisions\/3424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}