Swine Flu Conspiracy - up on the soap box

Ok, so I am not at all a conspiracy theorist, but this one has me a bit worried and annoyed with the media hype.

Yesterday at work we were talking about the Swine Flu vaccine and I thought I would look up why the Swine Flu (H1N1) is such a big deal...things like how many people have died, how many hospitalized, what are your chances of getting it...things like that.

Well I looked on the CDC's website and found some VERY interesting information.

302 people have died of the Swine Flu in the US since the the hype began, but 268 of those people had previous medical conditions. I found a graph that showed the chance of getting the swine flu. The highest two sections were 0-4 years and 5-24 years. The graph looked very daunting, but after figuring out the percentage it was minuscule. 22.9 people out of every 100,000 0-4 year olds will get swine flu. (that is a mere 0.023% chance of getting the flu) That isn't even a tenth percent chance. Then I looked at the highest group and they had 26 people per 100,000 5-24 year olds. (that is a little higher, but only still 0.026% chance of getting the flu). So it seems that washing your hands and taking a vitamin will prevent most things.

These numbers were on the CDC's site and in very plain sight...you just needed to do the math so the numbers made sense.

So before I made my conspiracy conclusion :) , I needed to check the regular seasonal flu. I get this flu shot most years, but wanted to see if it was still worth doing.

On the same website, it showed that for the regular seasonal flu over 36,000 people die EVERY year and over 200,000 people are hospitalized. That seems more substantial....something worth having a vaccine for...although even this is only 0.065% of the population that gets hospitalized.

Now I am not telling you to get or not get the vaccine. I am just putting information out there that is easy to read and in one place. You can look at the CDC's website to double check my numbers, but for me, it seems a bit fishy to make a bunch of people get this vaccine when it hasn't been tested and it has only killed 302 people. Although sad that those people died it is 0.000099 % of the US population. Not worth the risk for me!


I have stepped down off my soap box now. Thank you!