As a hardened cynic I cannot in all honesty say that it was only the face masks that made me start to wonder, but they certainly piqued my curiosity.
Mexican governments are not famous for their compassionate concerns for their own people. If ordinary Mexicans were truly important to their government why do they have to leave their country in their tens of thousands every year in order to be treated like slaves and fugitives in a hostile land? Why would you need to leave the comfort of your home and family and friends for such misery and hardship if you had such a kind and caring government?
But what we see on our TV screens almost every day are images of ordinary Mexicans going about their business wearing pale blue face masks. We see images of uniformed face mask-wearing personnel strolling around the streets handing them out ‘free of charge’ to people not wearing them. It seems a strange thing to do for a government that is so unconcerned about its people that it’s quite happy to engineer its society in such a way that a life of slavery and fear in a racist xenophobic foreign land is preferable to life at home.
The face masks are supposed to be a response to an alleged outbreak of ‘swine-flu’, that supposedly originated in Mexico. At least half of our TV news bulletins are given over to the topic, and it features on the front pages of all the national papers. We see the various ‘experts’ lining up to talk about ‘pandemics’ and to remind us all of the great flu outbreak in 1918 that killed more people than World War One. To bring it closer to home we see a story of a young Scottish couple who recently had a holiday in Mexico and are now in quarantine in a Scottish hospital where they are being treated for ‘swine-flu’. We see reporters going around the couple’s hometown interviewing citizens who might have breathed in the same air. We see the panic-stricken faces of those same citizens as they share their very real concerns about their safety and that of their loved ones. We haven’t quite got people running around hysterically pulling out their hair screaming that it’s the end of civilization as we know it — but that doesn’t seem far off.
Yet if we have a little look at the facts, as far as we know them, you can only scratch your head and wonder what all the fuss is about.
At the time of writing the young Scottish couple who have shown ‘mild flu-like symptoms’ are the only confirmed cases in the UK, with a mere fifty other people being tested. According to The Independent today (29th April) the US has reported a total of 64 cases. In Mexico itself, where you would assume the disease must be completely out of control, about 2000 people are supposed to have it and 152 people are supposed to have died because of it — from a population of about 109,000,000. So this international panic reduces to the possibility of one in every 50,000 Mexicans having flu. Yet intriguingly the same report devotes just half a sentence to the rather conflicting information that ‘the World Health Organization said it had notification of 79 confirmed cases worldwide.’ The report did not tell us how many people had been struck by lightning worldwide since the outbreak of this ‘pandemic’, but the comparison might have been interesting.
In a different article in the Independent we learn that:
The World Health Organization have said the deadly swine flu virus could no longer be contained and raised its alert to just two steps lower than the maximum of six, signifying a “significant increase in risk of a pandemic.” Presumably this is the same WHO that reported “79 confirmed cases worldwide.”
Let’s get back to the face masks. Why is the Mexican government distributing them to all and sundry?
One of the many ‘experts’ gracing our TV screens yesterday, whose name escapes me, informed us that the face masks are all but useless for people hoping not to catch the infection, as contaminated air could pass around the sides of the mask. Furthermore, apparently the masks quickly become unserviceable because they become damp through the moisture in the breath of those using them. So why is the Mexican government distributing them so generously to all and sundry?
Perhaps its intentions are not to help people remain infection-free themselves, but to help stop them spreading the virus. If the outbreak had occurred in Sweden say, one of the few countries that does seem to care about the welfare of its people, I might have thought that a credible explanation. But this is Mexico, whose government really couldn’t care a tinker’s cuss about the overwhelming majority of its people, and doesn’t seem a likely candidate to waste too many pesos on dishing out freebies.
I’m sure there’s nothing suspicious about the fact that Emperor Obama apparently requested an extra $1.5 billion from the US congress yesterday to ‘build anti-virus stockpiles and to monitor the spread of the disease’ (presumably the WHO are not up to that particular job). Or the fact that whoever it is that’s in the business of making face masks is doing extraordinarily well at the moment (according to The Guardian: ‘The Department of Health is also in talks to “urgently increase” stockpiles of surgical face masks, to be used by doctors and nurses if infections spread more widely here.” – even though most ‘experts’ seem to agree the masks are all but useless); or printers (more from The Guardian: ‘The government is today preparing a mass information campaign that will see leaflets about swine flu delivered to every home in the UK as fears grow that the virus will become a pandemic.’) To say nothing of the assorted spooks and spin-doctors whose careers are entirely wrapped up with keeping the public in a permanent state of twitchy anxiety. I’m sure there’s no connections between any of these things.
I predict this curiously named swine-flu ‘pandemic’ will go exactly the same way as the equally curious bird-flu ‘pandemics’ of the last couple of years; that a few more billions of taxpayer pounds will find their way into some dubious bank accounts; that no more people will die from flu than in any normal year without millions of government leaflets and face masks; and that our governments will proclaim this long and loud as ‘major victory’ and a direct consequence of their ‘vigilance’ and ‘leadership’.
Having said all that I might actually try and get myself a freeby face mask if I can — it might screen the overwhelming aroma of pig shit.