Oops, I meant no *vaccines* were mandated...

You know, I'm kind of tired of this bashing of the swine flu "hysteria". All reports coming from Mexico, since confirmed by studies, have shown that younger people were much more highly afflicted by this flu (I believe almost 50% were younger adults), and it seemed to be spreading very quickly. This was early information that was very alarming and showed it may become something very pandemic-like. Since then, some of this information has changed, or the virus may have mutated and become less deadly, but some of the pandemic-like characteristics still remain. Even the spanish flu started milder in the summer before it really broke out.

And, nobody really knew what this early information meant. Even in April, some universities estimated the worst-case in the united states will be approximately 1,000 by May 18th (link) while the try number of cases was AT least 5x that (link). The actual cases were probably much more, and by july it was estimated at around a million in the US. Sure, it was becoming clearer that the death rate was small by then, but this couldn't have been known earlier on.

The response to this information was nothing draconian: no viruses were mandated or anything like that. People were simply asked to wash their hands, avoid coming out if sick, etc. Schools were shut down, but again not that big of a deal. Obviously the majority of the big cities in Mexico, the epicenter, were shut down. The only possible conspiracy-theory type reasoning that may be true is that companies making tamiflu and other drugs made a lot of money off of this. Without additional evidence, that doesn't mean the "hysteria" was manufactured.

All in all, everybody go to exercise their preparedness responses, and improve on them if they were deficient. I think the response, while probably not perfect, was pretty impressive actually.