Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Obama’s H1N1 national emergency declaration could invoke FEMA response to pandemic

President Obama’s declaration of a national pandemic emergency is “no cause for alarm,” reported the mainstream media throughout the weekend. The declaration is nothing more than a “precaution,” they say. “It’s really more a continuation of our preparedness steps,” said Anne Schuchat, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in a USA Today story.
In other words, there’s not really any emergency at all. So why declare a national emergency in the first place? The media reports this was done to allow hospitals to bypass federal regulations concerning the setting up of large-scale triage sites — emergency medical camps quickly constructed to deal with large numbers of sick people.
But at the same time, H1N1 isn’t causing large-scale sickness. As USA Today reported, an expert on infectious disease, P.J. Brennan (the chief medical officer for the Penn Health System at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia) said, “The public ought to take some solace, some relief in this. It’s not a suggestion that things have deteriorated in any way. In no way is the virus more severe or more difficult to manage.”
So let me get this straight. The H1N1 virus remains mild. The CDC reports that swine flu infections already peaked out in mid-October. There have been no new developments in swine flu that would be cause for alarm and no reason to suspect huge numbers of sick people flooding into the hospitals. And yet, for some reason, the Obama administration has declared a national pandemic emergency specifically for the purpose of speeding the ability of hospitals to process large masses of sick people through emergency medical triage tents?
What are these people not telling us...?

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