Obama’s Cloward-Piven strategy of manufacturing a crisis using the swine flu as an excuse to ram Obamacare down our throats suffered a blow yesterday when the CDC called into question the wild, little-boy-who-cried-wolf predictions being tossed around publicly by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology,

Up to 90,000 deaths from swine flu in the United States, mostly among children and young people?

Up to 1.8 million people hospitalized, with 50 percent to 100 percent of intensive-care beds in some cities filled with swine-flu patients?

Up to half the population infected by winter?

On Monday, a White House advisory panel issued a report with these estimates, calling them “a plausible scenario” for a second wave of infections by the new H1N1 flu. The grim numbers by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology received considerable play in the news media, including front-page coverage in The Seattle Times.

On Tuesday, however, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the agency with the most expertise on influenza pandemics, suggested that the projections should be regarded with caution.

“We don’t necessarily see this as a likely scenario,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

A CDC press officer, speaking carefully to avoid a feud with the White House press office, said, “Look, if the virus keeps behaving the way it is now, I don’t think anyone here expects anything like 90,000 deaths.”

This shouldn’t come as any surprise since Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director-General of WHO, said this just last month at a conference in Cancun, Mexico,

We are still seeing a largely reassuring clinical picture. The overwhelming majority of patients experience mild symptoms and make a full recovery within a week, often in the absence of any form of medical treatment. Research published last week confirms that this pattern, in which most patients experience mild influenza-like illness, has also been seen in Mexico.

Now obviously, we should still be concerned about possible directions that the swine flu might take, since there’s so much about it we don’t know.  A studied response and a good deal of caution are in order.  Yet, if the experts on influenza epidemiology say that the problem’s not likely to be as big as we’re being told, then I think we should probably believe them.  And what we DO know about H1N1 so far doesn’t justify the fearmongering emanating from Obama’s administration.  It certainly doesn’t justify the cynical use of fear about the swine flu to push for the rapid passage of some form of Obamacare – which wouldn’t deal with swine flu epidemiology anywise. 

When is the Obama administration going to stop using fear and ignorance as tools to advance its agenda?