From Canada Free Press with a HT to Gates of Vienna:
By Arthur Weinreb Monday, April 12, 2010
Figures have recently been released that show how much money the government of Canada spent on the H1N1 flu pandemic. The feds spent $37 million on advertising and communications. This was more than was spent on anti-virals ($14 million), preparing emergency responses ($8.6 million) and outbreak management ($21 million).
After the figures were released, Dr. Richard Schabas, a former Ontario medical officer of health, renewed his criticism that the government spent too much money after the flu outbreak had finished. In the end, although the H1N1 did qualify as a worldwide pandemic, its effect on the vast majority of those who caught it was mild. Many people had this particular strain of flu and didn’t even know it. The number of people who died from H1N1 was about one tenth of the number of Canadians who die each year from ordinary flu.
There is nothing unusual in the fact that the government spent so much money advertising in order to tell people where they should go and get their flu shots. It was perfectly consistent with the way democratic governments operate in the 21st century.
It is often said that the most important duty of a government is to protect its citizens. While this may have been true at one time, today a government’s primary function is to protect itself and its members. Even if the government had known for a fact that there was only a one in a billion chance that H1N1 would become a major health problem for the country, they still would have spent the same amount of money including that spent on advertising. It’s not like they were spending their own money. And since other countries were doing the same thing, Canada would have looked bad if the government failed to tell its citizens day after day after day to go and get their flu shots and the one in a billion chance became a reality.
Having acquired a lot of the vaccine, it then became imperative to get rid of as much of it as possible, lest the government be accused of waste. And advertising as much as possible was necessary in order to accomplish this. So no one including Dr. Schabas should be surprised that the advertising and dire warnings about not getting a flu shot continued well after the pandemic and the possible danger had ended.
