A New Level of Stupidity

In 75 years, we’ve gone from the Greatest Generation to the Lamest. We’re scared of our own shadows, we can’t do basic math and, lately, we’ve begun reacting to coughs and sneezes as if they’re gunshots.  (Burt Prelutsky)

Bert , it appears is an old fart like me... a bit older perhaps but certainly as observant.  
In the past couple of weeks I have never in my 75 years of life observed a level of stupidity...fueled by media driven fear.   I have lived through "Pandemics" of every proportion and fear and none have reached this level of sheer stupidity.  

I recall the Polio epidemic.. at one time considered pandemic in the early 50's.  There were people becoming infected all across this country... a number in the small town of Johnson City, Tennessee, where I grew up... one that I recall..a good friend in my class at Annie Wilder Stratton Elementary school.  There were something like 3000+ deaths in this time and yet...there was no hoarding.. no panic,, no closings...but there also was no great media hype..no fear mongering... just a calm reporting of the facts by reporters with no hidden agendas.  

In the 80's we had the measles pandemic with somewhere around 1,200,000 deaths world wide...in 1991.. the last great outbreak nearly 1,000, 000 died world wide... only a few hundred in the US.. but yet world wide there was no panic.  

In 1968-69 there was the "Hong Kong Flu" that spread quickly from Hong Kong to SEA and Vietnam... I don't recall the slowing of troopo shipments to SEA during this time,  Guess getting shot was less risky than the flu that killed over a million worldwide within a year. In the US...100,000 died and most were over 65 years of age.
B there was no panic.. no hoarding.. no closings of business or schools overall.  But then there was also no media hype ..24/7.  ( FYI this had the same root as todays CV H3N2 virus)

In 2007 yet again another "flu" epidemic (SARS) which was world wide but didn't have a great effect on the US for some reason .  There were .. according to WHO.. 0ver285, 000 deaths. This"flu" was also from the H1N1 virus and mutation.  Again we had no panic..no closing of business. no stock market  crashes despite being pandemic and in as many countries as the CV of today.  

Then in 2013-14 we had a pandemic called EBOLA.   that killed over 12,000  and counting worldwide.and several thousand in the US  Yet the panic in the US was confined to about 8-9 states.  Quarantine was of folks entering the US by air travel from countries most effected by the virus.  Schools were closed in only a few places.  A building housing two schools in Cleveland Ohio were shut down for one day to sanitize because a staff member had been on a plane occupied by one of the individuals that was a reported case the say after the supposedly infected person had flown on it . Three schools were closed in Belton , Tx for no other reason than panic due to reporting.  Another school was closed in Missisippi because the principal had visited an African country during the summer.  

Again...there was no hoarding.. no wide spread closures...no 24/7 reporting , no fear mongering.  

Government action did not occur until after several hundred deaths and months after the virus was first found in the US and yet there was no hue and cry by the media or politicians.   

In this case the CDC actually failed.  One reason and similar to today's CV problem.. vaccinations had not been approved for use in humans by the FDA.  Having a vaccine and having it approved for use depends on how fast the hoops in the FDA can be jumped through.  

The probability that a potential drug entering clinical trial stage will be eventually approved by the FDA decreased from 23 percent to 11.83 percent( from 2003 to 2013) This means that the FDA is asking drug makers to produce more and more data, yet it's increasingly less likely to approve new drugs. Add onto this the cost..The Center for the Study of Drug Development estimated the cost of drug development in three studies stretching back to the early 1990s. According to their estimates, in 1991 a pharmaceutical company had to earn $412 million to make new drug development a worthwhile investment. By 2003 this number more than doubled to $1.047 billion. By 2016, the number more than doubled again to $2.558 billion (all numbers are in 2013 dollars). The estimates show that in the last quarter century, the cost of drug development increased more than six times.

Now folks there's a bit of history on epidemics and pandemics just over the past few years.  I've searched newspaper articles and such for these times and yet was not able to come up with any reason for the show of stupidity.. (and yes I'll stick to that term until proven wrong)....that I have observed during this fiasco.  Yep , another term that I will stick to since history has show there have been worse epidemics and pandemics and less HYPE.