False Alarms

Writing for Project Syndicate Henry I. Miller recommended

Most flu and public-health experts consider the WHO to have been overly alarmist. The decision in April 2009 to raise the pandemic flu threat to the penultimate level, Phase 5 (“Pandemic Imminent”), already raced far ahead of the accumulated data, so the Phase 6 declaration in June revealed the organization’s paradigm to be fundamentally flawed. A warning system based solely on how widely a virus has spread, but that does not consider the nature and severity of the illness it causes, would classify as “pandemics” not only seasonal flu, but also the frequent but largely inconsequential outbreaks of virus-caused colds and gastroenteritis, for example. (The WHO has never explained why these obvious examples do not meet their criteria.)