I want to talk about swine flu because my email load is starting to explode with this. In large part it’s my right wing email load. I’m also, you know, I’m on multiple email lists and you know I’ve got a giant pile of right wing email every day as well as the left wing or liberal email. I would say the average American email. But without getting into that debate.

The state of Massachusetts right now is considering a law, or at least the law has been proposed which in the state of Massachusetts will make it legal for the police to walk in and, for the police to come to the home of somebody in Massachusetts and you know, if they don’t want to get vaccinated, kick in their door and shoot em up. Or at least that’s how its being characterized over at the hysterical right wing site WorldNetDaily, which occasionally gets it right. Chelsea Schilling writing...

A "pandemic response bill" currently making its way through the Massachusetts state legislature would allow authorities to forcefully quarantine citizens in the event of a health emergency, compel health providers to vaccinate citizens, authorize forceful entry into private dwellings and destruction of citizen property and impose fines on citizens for noncompliance.

And if you don’t comply you can go to jail for 30 days. Of course if you’re infected, they’re not going to be all that enthusiastic about it. Now, there’s also talk about how the swine flu vaccine that has been developed, that there is not enough of the basic virus from which they make the vaccine. So they’re adding an adjuvant; something to potentiate, or something that makes the body’s immune response more hysterical to the vaccine so it takes a smaller amount of vaccine to produce the immune response. The way vaccines work is you get a little bit of the virus, whether it’s weakened or whether it’s dead, the body responds to the proteins associated with it. Sometimes it’s not even the entire virus, it’s just some of the proteins associated with the virus. The body’s immune system reacts to that going oh my god look at this we’ve got to build antibodies. The body starts constructing specific antibodies to that particular virus. And those antibodies continue to circulate in the body for a period of time, some vaccines are good for a year, some for 5 years, some for life, depending on what the virus is and how the immune system responds.

So, we have a new virus but we also have a new vaccine. It’s relatively untested. It looks like it’s going to be rolled out for the military first and all members of the military are going to be required to be vaccinated. Those of you old enough to remember Gulf War I, when, well, for that matter, Gulf War II, when the soldiers were vaccinated against anthrax with an experimental anthrax vaccine and now we have Gulf War illness, which may track back to that vaccine. The Bush Administration giving immunity to vaccine manufacturers. And that’s on top of other immunities that they were given, no pun intended, before.

Now, in the midst of this I got a really thoughtful letter. I want to thank, his name is Steve. He’s a physician in Orange County. He says he’s one of the few liberal physicians there. Good on ya Steve. And it was a very thoughtful and, you know, useful explanation of what he’s seen. He’s actually seen 30 cases of swine flu in his practice because he’s one of the sentinel. Some doctor’s offices around the country are identified by the, I’m assuming by Centers for Disease Control, as sentinel offices. They’re like the canaries in the mine cage, in the mine shaft. And they have to report all of their flu like symptoms, send a swab off to CDC or whoever it is and maybe it’s the state rather than the federal government, and get tested, and then they find out if it’s actually swine flu or not. And he say’s he’s had 30 cases of confirmed swine flu. He hasn’t gotten it himself yet. We talked about this last week and somebody called and I was talking about virulence, as if it meant severity. And the caller said no virulence means the ability, the transmissibility, contagiousness. And this physician says no, actually, virulence means both. And so thank you for that.

But anyway, the point that he makes is that there is this thing called herd immunity. And if most of us buy into the vaccine, if most of us get the vaccine, then there’s widespread immunity throughout the herd, all of us. And so people who don’t buy in are kind of opting out of the social compact that the rest of us have created. And because not everybody will successfully get immunity from the vaccine, the vaccines are not 100% effective, they’re putting at risk even those people who got vaccinated who didn’t get the immunity. Now this is the very kind of logical common sense approach to vaccines. And to a pandemic. A worldwide epidemic, a massive epidemic

But there’s other, and there’s a lot of, see here’s where it gets really complicated. There are conflicting reports on the lethality, the deadliness, of this virus. The CDC, the government, Sebelius, HHS, they’re saying that they’re expecting 90,000 deaths in the United States. We typically have 36,000 deaths. That’s not a huge leap. On the other hand they’re talking about 1 in 15. I’ve seen two different numbers and I’m not sure where these numbers are originating. But I’m seeing them reported in like mainstream media. 1 in 15 or 15% which are completely different numbers, of people who end up in hospital ERs with the swine flu have to be put on a respirator for some period of time. And the experience that they’ve had in South America indicates that there’s a lot of people who are going to need respirators and we don’t have enough respirators.

And if you’re not put on a respirator, you know, because this infection seems to really whack the lungs. If you are put on the respirator, fine, you can make it through. If you’re not put on the respirator that’s when you die. And it might have been that way in 1918 with the Spanish flu, although this one appears not to be anywhere near as bad.

Which brings up a whole second issue, which I’ll bring up in a second. It might have been the same in 1918 with the Spanish flu had there been respirators, but there weren’t. So it might have been that many millions who died, or hundreds of thousands in the United States who died wouldn’t have died if there had been advanced respirators.

But this all also brings up the 2nd question which is, we have a virus floating around, the swine flu virus, that has three different types of DNA associated with it. It has occupied birds, pigs and people. And so it has DNA that is bird friendly, pig friendly and people friendly. Particularly pig friendly, that seems to be the last place that it came from before it jumped into people. And so now they’re talking about let’s vaccinate all the pigs in the country or in the world. And part of that is to protect the pork industry. But a larger part of that is out of the concern that the more people who get it, viruses mutate really rapidly and there can be hundreds of billions of viruses in a single person or in a single pig. And, you know, and the mutation rate is really, really, really high. Now the good news is, the vast majority of mutations are not successful at increasing virulence, lethality or transmissibility and in fact they cause the virus to die.

But what happens if we get a more virulent strain of this flu, the inoculation has done nothing to help? You see where it’s getting complex. And at one point, think back to SARS. SARS was incredibly deadly and it was a corona virus. It was a common cold virus that had mutated to become lethal. And I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out how they stopped the SARS virus which started in China, jumped out of Hong Kong and boom was going all over the world. And suddenly they just shut that thing down. How did they do that? I’m not sure anybody can explain. You know, what was going on in China? Were they putting people to death in China who had it? Because there were entire communities that were infected with SARS.

And what happens if there’s a, this is Laurie Garrett in her book “The Coming Plague,” I mean it was a pretty damn scary book. She’s talking about there’s a plague coming. And we might see a significant thinning of the herd. So what do we do? And what do we do with a vaccine that may or may not be useful. It might be useful against this virus but it might not be useful against the jumped virus. How do we deal with this, as a country? And do we make the right wingers' worst fears valid by saying you know, we can use the power of police to make sure people get vaccinated. This is a tough topic.