The Editor,

Not to trivialize the deaths that have occurred due to H1N1, one has to wonder why governments have created a near panic with this "pandemic."

The average person seems unable or unwilling to understand information that is being provided by the media to make a logical decision on whether to get inoculated.

Much has been made of the fact that two people (a young lady in the Fraser Valley and a teenager in Ontario) have died and they were not in the "at-risk" group.

And the word "pandemic," a global influenza outbreak, has a frightening connotation of widespread death. The World Health Organization and Center for Disease Control have stated that every flu season, thousands of people die from the flu, a good many of them not at risk. This is due to the enigmatic ability of any virus to transmute and mutate, therefore affecting individuals differently.

WHO and CDC have also said that in the last decade, there have been two pandemics, discovered after the fact. This was because it wasn't until the data was collected that these outbreaks met the criteria for being classified as pandemics.

Now here is something that almost makes you feel you are lost in an episode of The Twilight Zone. As one government agency beseeches the public to avoid travel, cancel vacation plans and stay home, another agency is promoting the Olympics, asking people from around the world to come to Vancouver. Some people say these scare tactics are used to divert the public's attention from other problems, such as the recession, unemployment, budget shortfalls. People give the government too much credit. Our politicians are not that intelligent to use this kind of subterfuge.

Neil Swanson, Coquitlam