A Masterpeice of Hypocracy. The Mail Lecturing People on Creating Helath Scares!

The bare brass faced balls of the Daily Mail and it's columnists is truly the stuff of legends. How Richard Littlejohn, the star columnist of a paper that sells more health scares, does x cause cancer? (Answer to tabloid rhetorical questions are usually no.) Why brushing your teeth causes rectal prolapses, and grapes make you go psychotic "health" articles. Shit like that. Yes, -how Littlejohn, sitting in his tacky villa in Florida can type the following article and keep a straight face at the ironic chutzpah of writing an article condemning overreactions to health scares in a paper that does more health scare stories, than a PG factory churns out teabags. Actually I do understand how he can, that six figure; closer to seven salary of his. That's what.


Here it is in full then.


"Labour blew £1.2 billion on the swine flu epidemic that never was.

A new study says all the money spent on patronising advertising campaigns, vaccinations, anti-virals and face-masks probably saved just 26 lives.

Each case cost £46million, which would have paid for six months of cancer drugs for 3,000 patients.

And no one can be sure if those 26 people wouldn’t have died anyway. Swine flu claimed fewer lives in Britain than a normal winter flu outbreak.

That’s despite hysterical predictions from the ludicrous Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer and Whitehall’s resident Dr Death, that 65,000 people would die.

We’ve been here before. Labour’s default mode whenever a potential public health problem arose was blind panic.

During the foot-and-mouth scare, every farm in Britain was turned into an al fresco Argentinian barbacoa pit.

Millions of animals were slaughtered unnecessarily, causing untold hardship in rural communities.

Five minutes after a sheep sneezed in Lanarkshire, Gordon Brown was summoning a press conference to announce that he was taking charge.

It was more Corporal Jones than Winston Churchill.

Same with headless chicken flu and the non-existent SARS epidemic, which was going to lead to thousands of corpses on the London underground.

The Tories have form in this area, too. Remember the great heterosexual Aids epidemic myth, which consumed hundreds of millions of pounds in the 1980s?

Perhaps it is too much to hope that the new Government will introduce a sense of proportion.
At the moment the risk-averse ‘if it saves one life’ tendency holds sway.

We simply can’t afford to keep throwing billions at every health scare. Rule one: Don’t panic."


I've a few rebuttals on what's been written, so here we go:


1. Regarding Labour "blowing" 1.2bn on combating swine flu. Hindsight is 20/20 (his argument about money wasted that could have been used in cancer drugs is the same thing.). The outbreak may never have happened anyway. The preparations may have prevented it from spreading in the first place. The H1N1 strain (not technically swine flu, but a hybrid of 3 strains of flu) was reported to have been responsible for 457 UK deaths. SARS about 775 worldwide. So there was a danger, and they weren't "the scares that never were." Real, human casualties occurred. It's easy to sit there as an armchair spectator afterwards, proclaiming that there may never have been an outbreak after all. Truth is influenza has a nasty habit of mutating, SARS is a RNA based pathogen, and thus more prone to mutation and species jumping than a DNA based one. It's hard to detect before hand if a virus will mutate (evolution is a reactive force after all.). Containment (after preliminary victims were identified as succumbing to these viruses) is the best option.


2. You can't compare funding cancer drugs (of which the juries out on their effectiveness) with preventing a viral pandemic. They are completely different things. The cost of prevention, is much less than the cost of a pandemic (in both lives and money).

3. It's all good and well complaining about the powers that be are so obsessed with "elf n safety" in regards to "if it saves one life" mentality. But we all know that if it was a Mail columnists family member, or the right kind of "face fits" victim who succumbed, then they would scream blue murder at the governments /NHS callousness in allowing their loved ones to die. The "if it saves one life" mentality perhaps doesn't seem as rigid, if it is someone close to you who needs saving.

4. About foot and mouth. The main reason so many cattle were destroyed was that although it didn't kill all of them, it damaged their ability to produce milk. They were essentially almost worthless on the market. Handy going to uni with someone who was a dairy farmer!

5. Hmm heterosexual AIDS?? Yeah we didn't get an epidemic here. But there's this place called Africa, and you might say it's a bit of a problem over there. It's hard to predict the extent of an epidemic, before it has occurred.

But all these rebuttals, really miss the point of his article. Littlejohn is not really interested in how the health system deals with pandemics. It's a win win argument. If there is no pandemic, the government and NHS have overreacted and wasted tax payers money, and thus are the enemy. If there was a pandemic, the government and NHS are incompetent and failed the tax payer who funds them to do the job they are supposed to do, and are thus the enemy. And all this from a paper that can blow any health scare (if there is even any basis at all to justify it) into a hysterical end of the world scenario. They have no right to lecture anyone on "getting it into perspective."

This kind of thing by "hard hitting" columnists like Littlejohn really bugs me. All the snide racism and homophobia, and plain nastiness and ill spirit that saturates his cruddy column is bad enough. But Littlejohn has admitted himself that his job is to "sit at the back and throw bottles", when he was asked why; if he was so pissed off about everything, did he not become an MP himself. The world and his wife can sit at the back dismissing everything as toss. I know full well that Littlejohn lacks the intelligence and gumption to ever try to put forward active solutions, or to have a reasoned debate without resorting to name calling. It stinks when knee jerk cynicism is palmed off as "brave" and "controversial", by the likes of Littlejohn. It's just the laziest and most crude form of punditry going.