For those of us lucky enough to have dodged the bullet of “bird flu” a couple of years ago we are now faced with an even bigger plague of national destruction; the H1N1 media flu, I mean the H1N1 swine flu. This runny nosed nuisance is almost custom made for a political party in peril.

Just days after taking the oval office Barack Obama earmarked a billion dollars to fight the onset of what was gleefully forecasted by the media as an illness so profound that it could end life as we know it on the planet. Ten months later we are just beginning to receive the life saving serum specifically designed to thwart the disease.

News outlets are relentless in their daily updates of new case reports and the rising death toll attributed to the epidemic. At last count 1000 deaths have been attributed to the H1N1 virus in America so far this year. That certainly sounds ominous, right?

While the number of deaths may in fact be true, there are some other factoids that have been conveniently omitted from the reports. Like the fact that in that same time period 30,000 people have died of flu that was not the H1N1 strain. And by historic comparatives, those numbers mean we are experiencing a perfectly normal flu season.

What the media is failing to report is that every year in America 40,000 people die of generic influenza. Normally those who succumb to the flu are those particularly vulnerable like the very young, the very old and those with already diminished health. But historic statistics show that every year not all who die from the flu are in those most susceptible categories. Some are perfectly healthy who get the flu so serve that for any number of reasons they die. Tragic, yes. Unusual, unfortunately no.

During the “bird flu” scare a few years ago the country was told by the media medical talking heads to brace for a devastating flu season. Much blame was heaped on then President Bush for not being prepared to deal with this oncoming pandemic. We were told that while we had flu shots, the serum was for the wrong kind of flu strain and would likely not be effective against this budding bird borne blight. Some way, somehow we survived. And without even so much as a blip in the normal flu season mortality rate.

Bush was lax in any attempt to make political hay from this forecasted endemic disaster; Obama will not allow this opportunity to pass him likewise.

More than the billions of dollars in worldwide spending on appropriate antibodies, there is plenty of political capital to be made by averting the forecasted doom. The H1N1 flu has been a political tetherball since it first hit the newswires. Originally called the Mexican Swine Flu the name was changed to just Swine Flu once the Mexican government complained. Further complaints from pork producer’s associations had the named once again politically corrected to the scientific Nam de Plume H1N1.

Much like Nancy Pelosi’s ridiculous supposition that the non-stimulating stimulus passed by Congress is keeping the recession from being worse, the same approach will be taken with this media mania regarding H1N1. The fact that 30 times as many people have died from non-H1N1 related influenza, even before the proper antibodies hit the market, will likely never be mentioned. Only that the Messiah has saved the country a much worse fate than would have otherwise befallen us. There is, of course, no way to prove or disprove the hypothesis of Obamian intervention so it will be ladled out for mass consumption like momma’s chicken soup. The fact that most who do get the H1N1 brand of flu will recover with no extraordinary medical intervention will also be glaringly apparent by its omission from the discussion.

When it comes to the campaign happy Obama administration no opportunity is too small to take credit. Especially when everything else they have done has only made the situation worse.

It really is enough to make you sick.

It’s not that I don’t believe this new strain of flu bug has the ability to make a lot of people sick. It’s just that we have shown once again we are about to lose our ever loving minds over something that is, at best, a minor blip on the importance scale.

President Obama is being lauded as on top of this problem having announced a set aside of $1.5 billion to fight this flu pandemic. One question that was not asked that seems like it might be kind of important to me is, on what?

In one breath we are being told that millions of doses of anti-flu vaccines have been sent across the country. In the next breath we are told that this is a new strain of flu and that there is no vaccine in place to combat it. We are also told that the creation of a flu specific vaccine for this strain is very challenging and time consuming. So if we don’t have the right medicine to fight this new type of flu what type of flu vaccine are we blanketing the country with? Perhaps we are sending last year’s bird flu pandemic vaccine. There should be plenty of that left on the shelves seeing as that pandemic was as big a dud as the last 5 or 6 pandemics that were forecasted to wipe out half of the population. I wonder if the CDC is able to get a discount for buying last year’s model.

The fact is that, while tragic, so far we have only one confirmed death of a 2 year old child from this new strain of swine flu. To put this into a bit clearer perspective we normally have about 5 children per year die from drowning in the toilet. We have 226 confirmed cases of this flu in this country of 306 million, and that is only because we are looking for it. If we had 5000 deaths from this new strain of flu it would not even make a statistical blip in the averages.

On average there are over 20,000 deaths in this country every year from the flu and twice as many as that from pneumonia. As was the case of the single swine flu death, they are mostly children ages 1 to 4, those over 65 and those whose health is already compromised. One statistic that is not tracked is how many of those people would have likely died from some other disease had they not caught the flu.

The CDC is claiming that the spread of this strain is no different than the spread of a normal winter flu. If the CDC had actually bothered to do the math they would have seen that this flu pandemic is actually spreading far slower than the normal winter flu. The CDC is also advising that if there is a confirmed case of the H1N1 flu strain in a schoolchild, that school should shut down for 2 weeks. Currently there are 476 schools closed due to this warning. How 476 schools can close with only 226 total confirmed cases shows we may be overreacting more than a little bit.

The president is advising Americans to wash their hands, which is pretty much the same advice I got from my grandmother. Only the president isn’t going to yell at me in Czech if I don’t do it. I can only assume that part of the $1.5 billion being spent on the pandemic will go toward hand washing public service announcements produced in every language short of Martian, proper hand washing classes conducted round the clock by ACORN volunteers, an artist’s rendering of George Washington washing and possibly even a good old fashioned Uncle Sam poster saying “I Want You…To Wash Your Hands.”

The vice-president on the other washed hand is advising us to avoid any other living thing, stay indoors, put our head between our legs and kiss our ass goodbye.

Perhaps he might want to consider washing his foot as well as long as he is going to keep putting it in his mouth.