Hi Folks,
This is Planet Waves shortstop Cam Hassard chiming in with some of the day’s juicier nuggets. If you have other bits of exciting or odd news, please do post them to the comments area below or email me at cam.hassard (at) gmail.com. They said after my 111th column I would get my own Planet Waves email address, so you’ll be hearing from me a lot.
To say it’s been a difficult task to get away from the media saturation is a fair understatement. It’s like getting away from pork at a wedding. After waking up in a warm sweat this morning, I was thrilled to find that it was more due to the overheated roasting Sun spilling across Queens rather than a personal outbreak of swine flu. Despite growing reports of flu cases around the world, respectfully, no one has lost their life from it outside Mexico. Meanwhile thousands have died of complications from ordinary influenza this year; this is an ongoing issue. Flu is not good for you or other living things.
In an interesting lowdown from the ABC [kind of like the BBC, only American] the writers demonstrate a history of pandemic-esque circumstances and our collective tendency toward panic. it seems that when the big boys cry wolf, anxiety sets in so much that we remain essentially unsure whether to ignore it, pat it or shoot it.
We reported yesterday that the dubious corporation Baxter stands to make a lot of money from this whole situation, despite well-reported prior negligence where the health of the public is concerned. For big pharmaceuticals it’s business as usual — or, perhaps, unusual. With probable boosts in profit from anti-swine medicine, a number of drug companies’ share prices went up significantly this week, particularly Gilead Sciences, manufacturer of Tamiflu. (Gilead, in case you were wondering, was where Rummy used to make big, responsible decisions before becoming Bush’s number one defense lackey, and the co-inventor of that brilliant thing known as Iraq.)