Mandatory Swine Flu Shots? Nope.

Ugh. There are few things more irritating than misleading news stories about legislative bills. They're annoying mostly because it means I have to go digging through some piece of legislative gobbledy-gook in order to debunk them, and that's not fun.

Such is the case with the Sentinel article entitled Bill may make flu shot mandatory. The first flaw can be seen in that weaselly headline. What's with "may"? Either it makes them mandatory or it doesn't, right? This headline "may" be misleading!

Then there's this fearmongering lede:

A bill being considered on Beacon Hill would allow state government officials to search and destroy property without a warrant, fine and jail people for not taking a vaccine and bar people from assembling publicly during a state of emergency.

Well, that all sounds pretty bad. But is it actually true?

The bill in question is Massachusetts Senate Bill 2028. I actually heard about it a couple of weeks ago when a friend forwarded me a scary email from an antivaccination group, and wrote it off as senseless fearmongering from people who oppose vaccination no matter what.

I guess it's time to get more deeply into it. Here's the part of the bill that's going to scare people:

Specifically, but without limiting the generality of section 2A and notwithstanding the provisions of any other law, the commissioner shall have and may exercise, or may direct or authorize other state or local government agencies to exercise, authority relative to any one or more of the following if necessary to protect the public health during an emergency declared pursuant to section 2A or a state of emergency declared under chapter 639 of the acts of 1950.. During either type of declared emergency, a local public health authority as defined in section 1 of chapter 111 may exercise authority relative to subparagraphs (1), (2), (3), (4), (6), (7), (13), (14), and (15); and with the approval of the Commissioner may exercise authority relative to subparagraphs (5), (8), (9), (10), and (11):

(1) to require the owner or occupier of premises to permit entry into and investigation of the premises;
(2) to close, direct, and compel the evacuation of, or to decontaminate or cause to be decontaminated any building or facility, and to allow the reopening of the building or facility when the danger has ended;
(3) to decontaminate or cause to be decontaminated, or to destroy any material;
(4) to restrict or prohibit assemblages of persons;
(5) to require a health care facility to provide services or the use of its facility, or to transfer the management and supervision of the health care facility to the department or to a local public health authority;
(6) to control ingress to and egress from any stricken or threatened public area, and the movement of persons and materials within the area;
(7) to adopt and enforce measures to provide for the safe disposal of infectious waste and human remains, provided that religious, cultural, family, and individual beliefs of the deceased person shall be followed to the extent possible when disposing of human remains, whenever that may be done without endangering the public health;
(8) to procure, take immediate possession from any source, store, or distribute any anti-toxins, serums, vaccines, immunizing agents, antibiotics, and other pharmaceutical agents or medical supplies located within the commonwealth as may be necessary to respond to the emergency;
(9) to require in-state health care providers to assist in the performance of vaccination, treatment, examination, or testing of any individual as a condition of licensure, authorization, or the ability to continue to function as a health care provider in the commonwealth;
(10) to waive the commonwealth’s licensing requirements for health care professionals with a valid license from another state in the United States or whose professional training would otherwise qualify them for an appropriate professional license in the commonwealth;
(11) to allow for the dispensing of controlled substances by appropriate personnel consistent with federal statutes as necessary for the prevention or treatment of illness;
(12) to authorize the chief medical examiner to appoint and prescribe the duties of such emergency assistant medical examiners as may be required for the proper performance of the duties of the office;
(13) to collect specimens and perform tests on any animal, living or deceased;
(14) to exercise authority under sections 95 and 96 of chapter 111;
(15) to care for any emerging mental health or crisis counseling needs that individuals may exhibit, with the consent of the individuals.

Most of that is pretty uncontroversial, and all of it is contingent upon the governor declaring a public health emergency, and is limited to actions that help protect public health. When the emergency ends, the emergency powers go away.

How about that lede? Yes, in such a situation the state would have the right to destroy property, but only if that property poses a public health risk. They're not going to destroy your Xbox, but they could destroy your smallpox-infected blankets.

And yes, they could enter your property and even decontaminate it. But only if it's a risk to public health. Your anthrax lab may be in trouble, but your home probably isn't. Ditto to public assembly. If you're in the habit of hanging out with people who have ebola, you might be prohibited from doing so. If you're just going to the movies with some friends, no worry.

Now, that's not to say this is all a good idea. I'd be happy to see some amendments creating greater oversight than I find in this bill. The basic ideas aren't terrible, but they absolutely need to have sufficient oversight to keep them from being abused.

How about the claim that the bill would "fine and jail people for not taking a vaccine"? That's really not true. Here's what the bill says (with my emphasis):

(b) Furthermore, when the commissioner or a local public health authority within its jurisdiction determines that either or both of the following measures are necessary to prevent a serious danger to the public health the commissioner or local public health authority may exercise the following authority:

(1) to vaccinate or provide precautionary prophylaxis to individuals as protection against communicable disease and to prevent the spread of communicable or possibly communicable disease, provided that any vaccine to be administered must not be such as is reasonably likely to lead to serious harm to the affected individual; and
(2) to treat individuals exposed to or infected with disease, provided that treatment must not be such as is reasonably likely to lead to serious harm to the affected individual.
An individual who is unable or unwilling to submit to vaccination or treatment shall not be required to submit to such procedures but may be isolated or quarantined pursuant to section 96 of chapter 111 if his or her refusal poses a serious danger to public health or results in uncertainty whether he or she has been exposed to or is infected with a disease or condition that poses a serious danger to public health, as determined by the commissioner, or a local public health authority operating within its jurisdiction.

Part (1) there just gives public health officials the right to provide vaccinations to those for whom they're not contraindicated. No worries there.

Part (2) is the part that's being misrepresented in the headline. Nobody's going to be forced to get vaccinated. But if you refuse, and your refusal constitutes a public health threat, then you can be quarantined. Actions have consequences. But quarantine is not jail. That part comes from here:

Any person who knowingly violates an order for isolation or quarantine shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than 30 days and may be subject to a civil fine of not more than one thousand dollars per day that the violation continues.

So yeah, if you violate quarantine and go running around coughing your drug-resistant tuberculosis all over everybody like an asshole then you can be fined and jailed. Forcibly quarantined, basically.

But no, you can't be fined or jailed for not being vaccinated. Only if you refuse a vaccination and are determined to be a public health risk worthy of quarantine and then you violate that quarantine, then you can be.

Now, all this stuff is conditional. It doesn't have to be done, and the decisions of public health officials constitute the final word. This just lays out what sort of options are open to them, without dictating what they have to do. I'd argue it would take quite a bit more than the current swine flu to trigger most of these measures, but they're available as options.

So yeah, that's some potentially scary stuff, and it definitely needs appropriate safeguards in place. But it's also worst-case scenario stuff. And while it could use improvements, the basic ideas behind it are sound from a public health perspective, at least for certain threats. Most public health officials are fully aware that quarantines and isolation aren't very effective at stopping the spread of influenza, so I'd be shocked to see that happen.

Continuing with the Sentinel article, here comes a group we probably shouldn't listen to:

Bob Dwyer, a coordinator for the Massachusetts Liberty Preservation Association -- a non-profit, non-partisan organization -- said the bill is a "power grab" by the state.

"If you don't want to take a vaccine you can be arrested," Dwyer said. "What type of freedom is that? I don't think declaring a state of emergency should change a person's Constitutional rights."

While it's true that the Massachusetts Liberty Preservation Association is politically non-partisan, it can hardly be said that they're non-partisan on the subject of vaccines. They're not: they're strongly antivaccinationist.

In other words, this is about more than fears of government overstepping, it's also about promoting their antivaccine nonsense. Stuff like this:

Vaccine trials and testing has been scaled back and expedited adding risk. Government officials have granted advanced approval of these highly questionable vaccines.

The swine flu vaccine has had extensive testing, and is made exactly the same way as the seasonal flu (which has lots of testing of its own). There's nothing "questionable" about it, and to assert that's the case is disingenuous.

Further down the same page they have videos by an antivaccinationist chiropractor who keeps promoting the disproven assertion that childhood vaccination causes autism. It doesn't.

Maybe the MLPA has valid points about the bill itself. Unfortunately, their lack of understanding about vaccines and public health and the fact that they're using lies about vaccines in order to make their argument means they really can't be taken seriously. They may not be Democratic or Republican, but they're totally partisan on the issue of vaccines. They're on the quackery side, and have no credibility on this topic.

The rest of the Sentinel article is typical newspapery tripe. Local citizens think A and B, local public officials think X and Y and Z. Not much of use in it besides this, from James Eldrige:

"What this bill really reflects is an updating of our public-health laws from the 1950s," he said. "The new bill provides many civil liberty protections and improvements."

Eldridge said the previous law allows for a "blanket statement" that does not specify due process laws. The new proposal gives authorities specific direction of when a person can be arrested.

"Certainly with the number of viruses that have appeared across this country in recent years, I think that the state needs to be better prepared so that if there is a serious pandemic, the state can protect the public," he said. "At the same time, that needs to be done with a balancing act between liberty and security."

Yes, this is an updating of what was already an overly-broad law. Is it still too broad? I think it is, but not by too much.

It's indeed a balancing act. With a major public health emergency, you do need to respond quickly, and you're probably going to need to step on some people's toes when trying to protect others. There need to be measures in place to make sure that as few toes are stepped on as possible, and that rights are preserved as much as they possibly can be. There should be zero tolerance for any abuse of these laws, and any potential Constitutional conflicts should be eliminated before the bill becomes law.

But even as it stands now, this bill really can't be construed to mean that everyone is going to be mandated to have a swine flu shot. That's just not going to happen on that kind of grand scale. It's unenforceable, especially within the timeframe we're talking about. I'd be surprised if more than a few individuals, if any at all, get that kind of mandate.

The bill isn't perfect, but nor is it the mandate for swine flu vaccination that some are claiming. By all means let's criticize the parts that are troublesome, but spouting false claims about it mandating the flu shot when that's not actually the case won't do anything but muddy the real issue, which is that we absolutely do need up-to-date legislation for dealing with a public health emergency. Perhaps this bill isn't perfect, but let's fix the real problems instead of freaking out about invented ones.

Swine Flu (probably) Hits Leominster Schools

There's an interesting article in the S&E today about high absentee rates in Leominster schools. This is most likely an outbreak of swine flu/H1N1, but it seems as if those quoted in the article are reluctant to admit it.

Let's look at the article.

A large number of students have been out sick at Fall Brook Elementary School over the past week, but there have been no confirmed cases of swine flu, according to Superintendent of Schools Nadine Binkley.

"There has been a lot of flu going around, but it's of the fairly light variety," Binkley said.

Binkley said 65 students at Fall Brook were out sick Wednesday. The school has between 20 and 25 absences per day during an average week throughout the year, Binkley said.

Fall Brook has a total of 664 students.

Okay, that's a good chunk of students out. It's about 10% of the total student population, and three times the normal level.

There being "no confirmed cases of swine flu" doesn't actually mean a whole lot, because of the way the word "confirmed" is defined. According to the CDC, here's what it takes to be a confirmed case:

A confirmed case of novel influenza A (H1N1) virus infection is defined as a person with an influenza-like illness with laboratory confirmed novel influenza A (H1N1) virus infection by one or more of the following tests:

1. real-time RT-PCR
2. viral culture

So yeah, to be considered a "confirmed case," you have to actually do lab work to confirm it. You can have swine flu without being a confirmed case, and most people at this stage will not be confirmed cases simply because these tests are no longer being done for most cases.

This was pointed out in the article, though they neglect to give you the background about what "confirmed" means:

Leominster Health Director Christopher Knuth said Wednesday that there have been no confirmed cases of swine flu at Fall Brook, but also noted that the state recently stopped testing for it.

"We wouldn't get notified anymore," Knuth said.

Bingo. There actually can't be any confirmed cases if that testing isn't done. Hell, there probably can't even be any "probable" cases, since those also require a lesser degree of testing.

So when you read "but there have been no confirmed cases of swine flu", it really tells you nothing at all. These cases are going to be considered "suspected," as will the vast majority of swine flu. It's just not practical to test everybody at this stage.

Binkley's statement about there being a lot of cases of the flu going around, but them being "of the fairly light variety" is also telling.

First of all, there's no reason for that "but." H1N1 at this stage doesn't appear to be much more severe than the seasonal flu. Having had the seasonal flu, I'd never refer to it as "light," but if you're expecting H1N1 to be a death sentence you might.

Secondly, if there's a lot of flu going around currently, it's almost certainly H1N1. Here's a chart of flu cases by week from the CDC:

A very good explanation of this chart (including its weaknesses) can be found here, but I'll sum it up for you.

The orange bars represent swine flu, yellow is non-subtyped influenza A, which may or may not be swine flu, and the other colors are not swine flu, but are mostly what we'd consider the seasonal flu.

Knowing that, you can pretty easily see the seasonal flu fading away and the swine flu taking off. The little spike at the end of flu season is probably an artifact of increased testing as swine flu began to appear, but we were near the end of flu season, and subsequent weeks show it falling off.

The important thing to take from this is that the seasonal flu is basically done for this season. The swine flu is likely responsible for the vast majority of current flu cases.

Certainly it's possible that there are other factors at work in Leominster's situation. Absenteeism increases at the end of the year, normal colds and allergies may be getting misidentified as the flu, etc. But if it is indeed the flu, it's most likely the swine flu.

So, it's a possible flu outbreak. What are they going to do about it?

"We're going to sit tight with it for right now," Binkley said. "There are a lot of factors we weigh before we would close a school."

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education advises schools to remain open as long as the absences have not affected teaching and learning, Binkley said.

"We don't have a high number of teachers out, and we feel that the classroom environment is still productive," Binkley said. "We don't think it's serious enough to close the school."

This is probably fine. There are indeed a lot of factors to consider before closing a school. A closure doesn't just affect the students, it affects the whole community. Sick kids means parents staying home to take care of them, which means those parents aren't at work, which means your plumber can't come fix that leak because he has to cover for his coworker whose kid is sick. The impact reaches a lot further than you might first imagine.

Since Leominster's last day before summer recess is tomorrow, it's probably more reasonable just to finish up the year than to close early and make a mess of things.

The article gives several good pieces of advice about what to do if you have the flu, most of which you've heard before. Most importantly, if you're sick, and especially if you have a fever, stay home.

Let me repeat that: stay home. That doesn't mean going to the grocery story instead of work or school. It doesn't mean hanging out with friends. It means sitting around in your house, feeling crappy. (If you want to kill time, I suggest playing this flash game about sneezing on people. It's oddly satisfying.)

When school gets out on Friday, any student who does have swine flu will suddenly have a lot more opportunities to infect others in the community. Even on vacation, staying home and not becoming a disease vector to those around you is important.

Finally, if you're healthy, don't worry. Yes, there is flu in the community. There's not much you can do about it outside of normal disease control measures (hand washing, careful with sneezing, etc). If you get it you'll probably feel pretty lousy, but unless you have underlying medical problems you're unlikely to die from it.

It's nothing to panic about, and it sounds like keeping the school open is a perfectly reasonable decision. But let's call a spade a spade. Yes, this is probably swine flu, and there's no reason to pretend otherwise. Now let's deal with it.

Swine Flu, Satan, Obama, and the NWO?

I couldn't possibly introduce this better than the description given by the uploader:

EXCLUSIVE EVIDENCE .. comment ...rate ... AREA CODE 619 MANTRA WAKE UP TO TRUTH.. supercharged binary patheogens false flag bio weapons. USA is being sacrificed!..by NWO psycopaths ..wake up to the truth!

The video makes exactly as much sense as that description...



I don't know about you, but that sure convinced me. I am really disappointed that I missed the "Ba'al day of worship" festivities, though. Maybe next year.

Swine Flu Tied to Beloved Actor?

The Boston Globe has pretty reasonable swine flu coverage. It's mostly sane stuff that promotes caution, while avoiding things that just serve to freak people out. For instance, they avoided irresponsibly sticking a giant "OUTBREAK" headline on the front page of the paper like our local idiots did today.

Anyway, as part of their coverage they have this neat "flu spreads" graphic.

The graphic consists of six slides, but it's slide number four that really caught my eye.


That is clearly Wilford Brimley in an Army helmet. Thanks for the pandemic, Wilford!

Swine Flu: From space?

The "authorities" think the current Swine Flu outbreak started with a small Mexican child, but we know better!



Everyone knows that airplanes are giant disease-mobiles. Obviously, a space vessel could only make matters worse. George Lucas has screwed us yet again.

Swine Flu: What to do, and not do

There's a lot of news about swine flu right now, and for good reason. While it's impossible to know at this point whether this will lead to a flu pandemic, the potential does exist.

There's a lot that's still unknown about this flu strain, but there are some basic things that people can do--and other things people should avoid--at this point. I'm not going to offer medical advice, since I'm not qualified to do so, but most of this stuff is pretty simple.

Let's start with what you can do to protect both yourself and others. Most of these should be obvious, but they're worth repeating anyway.

1) Wash your hands. Use hot water and soap. A quick splash is not enough, you need to spend a bit of time. Recite the alphabet to yourself while doing it, and by the time you're done that should be about enough time. If you're unable to get to a sink for whatever reason, you could carry around some Purell or a similar product to sanitize your hands.

2) Cover your mouth if you cough or sneeze. But don't sneeze into your hand! If you have a tissue, use that and then throw it away immediately. Don't keep a used-up disease rag in your pocket. If you don't have a tissue, then cough or sneeze into your elbow, like this:


Yeah, you might gross up your inner elbow, but it's better than getting gunk on your hands and then spreading it to others, or sneezing unimpeded and spewing germs all over the room.

3) Learn about the flu. As with any fast-moving and poorly-understood disease, there's going to be a ton of bad information out there. Inoculate yourself against it with good information.

Here are some good resources:

• The Center for Disease Control's Swine Flu page - Good general clearinghouse.
• Pandemicflu.gov - Also handy if you're still worried about Avian Flu!
• The World Health Organization's swine flu page - Another good clearinghouse for information.
• Effect Measure blog - A blog written by epidemiologists and public health officials. Provides better context and analysis than simple press releases.
• H5N1 blog - One of the better "flu blogs" out there. Is covering H1N1 (swine flu) extensively.

Most of these sites also provide a lot of links if you want even more information.

4) Don't kiss any pigs. This is just a good rule in general.

So, those are a few simple things that you can do to cut your own risk and the risk you might pose to others if you happen to get infected. Now on to things you really should not do.

1) Don't go to work/school/public events if you're sick. Going out in public while sick doesn't mean you're tougher than the disease, it means you're a jerk who doesn't care about making everyone else sick. Unless you really want to be known as the guy/girl who spread disease to all your friends, just stay home.

2) Don't stick your hands in your mouth, eyes, or nose. Again, obvious. Even if you think your hands are clean, the mouth, eyes, and nose provide an easy way for diseases to get into the body. Best just to avoid them.

3) Don't listen to quacks. You're going to see a lot of scammers offering totally ineffectual "cures" over the next few weeks. There will be spam emails trying to sell you imaginary medicines, there will be people offering the insanely diluted liver of a diseased duck as a medicine, there will be holistic "healers" and homeopaths aplenty offering you products that are nothing more than a placebo. Don't waste your money.

4) Don't blame Mexico. I include this only because I've already seen people trying to use this outbreak to grandstand about illegal immigration (Google "swine flu" + immigration and you'll find lots of examples). That's utterly absurd. This outbreak could have started anywhere, and viruses don't care one bit about political borders. People who try to tie this to immigration are playing politics in the stupidest possible way.

5) Don't panic. Panic never helps, and there's no reason for it anyway. While H1N1 has the potential to become a pandemic, it's impossible to know how it will turn out at this early stage. There's a lot more we don't know about this flu strain than there is stuff we do know, so don't freak yourself out by jumping to conclusions that aren't based on fact.

As always, these lists are incomplete. But these are easy things to do, and they're good ideas even when there isn't a potential pandemic looming on the horizon.