We know the motivation for all the fake news pushed by the left. I fail to understand the motivation behind the fake news fed to us by conservative media.
I am baffled as well, but I suspect there's a good bit of pure meanness and spite, as a flavoring to their partisan politics. But there's been a metric tonne of bu l l s h i t from a bunch of sites and sources. I've given up trying to keep the bafflegab straight.
I will say that the antivax movement has gained a lot of traction over the past 20 years, in part due to the slickness of their presentations on the innanet, and in part due to the appallingly low level of scientific literacy of the average American.
Originally Posted by Idaho_Shooter
My cousin reports that she has seen no flu patients in almost a year.
I understand that sales of Tami-flu are nonexistent.
Have you seen similar in your practice?
Have Covid inspired restrictions eliminated the flu for the 20-21 season?
It's been interesting, and yes, I've seen the same thing in my ER's. My primary shop has a crackerjack lab panel, and we don't just do flu swabs for respiratory illnesses, we do a multi-organism Respiratory Virus Panel on many of our cases (it's a default setting if flu swab comes up negative). So we have numbers showing that not only has influenza been almost nonexistent, but infections due to Parainfluenza virus, Adenovirus, Respiratory Syncitial virus, and many others have been almost nonexistent as well.
This is not some vast global conspiracy to hide influenza deaths in the COVID numbers, as some of our rocket scientists are claiming. Our labs are simply not finding anything close to the infection rate of a host of viral respiratory pathogens, going back to last spring.
There is a lot of speculation about this, a lot of theorizing, but the broad brushstrokes seem to be that in the world of viral ecology, the various respiratory pathogens exist in a sort of steady-state with each other, competing for a limited number of susceptible human hosts. CoV2 as a novel virus was/is able to out-compete the usual villains for this susceptible population, and has driven the others into the background. They are still there, just not in numbers even close to what we usually see. It's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out when the fall virus season hits us.
As for Tamiflu, it's a useless drug that Big Pharma has been flogging with great profitability. I'm glad to see it's hurting the bastards where it counts, in their pocketbook.
Thank you for the insight. Perhaps a few will read and actually consider the facts.
And thanks for the opinion on Tamiflu. I have never purchased any. Now I will not in the future,
People who choose to brew up their own storms bitch loudest about the rain.
