Measles, Cyclospora, Hantavirus, and Ebola, Oh My!

It is like the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow are fretting about the dangers of “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” when the actual dangers they will face include, instead, a witch, flowers, and monkeys. Media have been promoting fear of a series of infections in America over the last couple years — measles, hantavirus, Ebola, and, most recently, cyclospora — though these diseases are far from the most significant threats to Americans’ health.

Over at his Unreported Truths website, Alex Berenson, provided on July 23 a good analysis of this new series of fearmongering reminiscent of what we saw a few years back concerning coronavirus. Pshaw, he answered to the lot, concluding:

A fecal parasite, and three viruses: one highly contagious disease spread through the air, the second generally confined to rodent hosts, the third blood-borne.

Cyclospora, measles, hantavirus, Ebola.

They have almost nothing in common. Except the media efforts to use them as a cudgel against the Trump Administration.

And this.

They haven’t killed anyone in the United States this year.

Not one person, young, old, or in-between.

Meanwhile, despite all the good news you’ve heard about the opioid epidemic, almost 70,000 Americans have died from overdose in the last 12 months.

Priorities, priorities.

Berenson’s comment regarding media efforts to use the infections “as a cudgel against the Trump Administration” fits right in with a contentious interview of United States Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. by Dana Bash on Sunday at the CNN show State of the Union. The interview featured Bash alternately playing up and down various health concerns, while discarding Kennedy’s differing views. Bash’s approach came in consistently supportive of the party-line arguments for government mandates and pharmaceutical industry profitability. In response, Kennedy offered that the “underlying priority” should be “to protect the Constitution,” while calling her out again and again for misstating the facts in regard to health-related matters she introduced in the interview.