I didn't mean to...I thought I was auditioning for Dr. Who.

Credit where credit is due: http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv=473KIeo_Xv0#t=3m25s

Case in point, Fukushima. The lines are strictly drawn by what they WANT to believe, not what's based on science.

The same effect was seen after Y2K. "Meh, those pointy-headed computer nerds warned everything would collapse, and it was fine! Not even a hiccup!"

No thought at all to the decade+ of preparation and fixes that were put in place to PREVENT the collapse that almost certainly would have happened.

and one time when I tried to explain to someone that it had been a real problem and that I myself had fixed code they outright called me a liar.

to keep their conspiracies alive. It was a real problem. It was identified as such, and people got to work eliminating the chances that it would seriously affect the planet. I remember the update Microsoft issued. Like most people, I installed it when it was released. CT folks can't remember stuff very well.

The stuff about planes crashing and power grids going down was a bit over the top, but it could have caused some disruptions and major inconveniences if it hadn't been fixed.

For a number of years afterwards I ran into various date issues because of code that hadn't been fixed. Some of no consequence, e.g. a simple date display, and some that messed up some accounting totals or whatever and had to be fixed.

If everyone had waited until after the fact it could have caused some real disruptions for a few months or more.

I work for one of the vaccine makers, and I assure you we bribed no one. And what this fuckers don't seem to understand also is that the swine flu wasn't a big deal for TWO reasons, 1) it wasn't quite as contagious as feared and 2) the vaccine was given out swiftly and effectively. I AM SO TIRED OF THIS SHIT. We can't win. If many more had died it would have been our fault. But since we (and I'm definitely talking about my company) worked our asses off to get a quick SAFE and effective vaccine on the market..most of which THE GOVERNMENT PAID FOR AT A CHEAP RATE, the swine flu obviously was just a marketing ploy to sell our stuff. I'm so fucking sick of moronic paranoid scientific illiterates.

...to reason with these idiots.

was that relatively few people actually got the vaccine. Then there was the thing about Guillain-Barre syndrome occurring because of the vaccine, which made even fewer people willing to get the vaccine.

Also, there was little or no genuine indication that the swine flu that year was likely to be deadly and dangerous.

A DU has a higher proportion of people who got GBS from the vaccine than in the population at large.

The rate of GBS from the 1976 vaccine was roughly 1:100,000, but by an amazing coincidence, the proportion of DUers who got GBS from the 1976 vaccine is closer to 1:25,000. Of course that all depends on whether anti-vaxers in the Health forum of DU2 were telling the truth.

But it was widely covered in the media, which had a great effect.

But more to the point, in my opinion, is that the entire program to hurry up and develop a vaccine and get it out there was very ill-advised.

When you have an outbreak of a disease that previously killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million, there's no way or reason to suspect that the disease won't spread beyond the couple hundred cases in a single area.

flu and died. No one else around him got it. Somehow, it was decided that we were on the very edge of a horrible flu epidemic and a vaccine had to be rushed into production.

It was at the time, not after the fact, that only one person got that flu.

There are also a lot of other things that are very different now from 1918. One thing is that almost all homes in this country now have running water, and regular hand-washing takes place in a way it didn't ninety-something years ago.

Another is that even though President Wilson was told over and over again to stop sending soldiers who'd been exposed to flu to other camps and overseas, he persisted in doing so. Army camps back in those days were very overcrowded. Many of the young soldiers were farm boys who'd lived in very small communities their entire lives and had never been more than a few miles from home. They'd not been exposed to a lot of the herd diseases, and so were highly vulnerable to those conditions.

I suspect that our current army camps (include here all other branches of the service) are far more sanitary than they were during WWI. Far fewer young people live as isolated from others as they did then. And so on.

Surely I'm not the only person out there who understands how different things are today.

All this is not to say that there could never be another terrible world-wide epidemic of some kind. But if that happens, it will come from some place we're not even looking at, is my guess.

As for relatively "few" people getting the vaccine, not the case,at least not here in MD where there were many many jam packed flu shot sessions where not having enough vaccine was a problem. Believe me, my company had no left over vaccine.

And if you think its all about conditions which led to the flu epidemic in 1912 you really don't understand virology much. That strain of influenza is still cultured in labs and is considered highly dangerous and I think is kept under Biosafety level 4 conditions (same as Ebola)

While that was a virulent strain, there were social conditions that greatly exacerbated its impact. The lack of handwashing. The crowding together of young men who'd never been off the farm. And, as already mentioned, the continued sending overseas of young men who had been exposed to this flu while still in camp. It was the perfect way to spread that flu.

And, as you seem to be aware, most people over the age of 50 had been through a previous type A flu epidemic a half century before (type A flu is the most virulent of the three types, A, B, and C, and not all A types are swine flu) and therefore were largely immune. That's why so few elderly even got it, let alone died.

Getting flu tends to confer a life-long immunity, as does getting smallpox.

But back to my point. One soldier had gotten the swine flu in 1976. One. That was not cause to start what amounted to a panic in the population. I lived in Washington DC at that time, and I did not get a vaccine, because early on it was clear to me that it was being handled all wrong.

The real issue these days is that there are rather large numbers of people who are immuno-compromised for various reasons, for whom otherwise relatively benign illnesses can be deadly. Those kinds of people didn't exist not too many years ago, and they lend a particular sensitivity to the entire concept of herd immunity.