MSNBC- Apparently “some importers don’t understand … you can’t catch Swine Flu from eating pork.” The perky MSNBC duo ridiculed China for banning pork from the US and Canada, but their guest expert interjected another priority: the correct term was “H1N1 virus,” not Swine Flu. Everyone agreed the distinction could quell international hysteria against the falsely accused.
Interesting that Health Officials should “STRESS THAT YOU CAN’T GET SWINE FLU FROM EATING PORK.” We need Health Officials to STRESS how to avoid Swine Flu, not where to avoid avoiding it. Leave it to the pork industry which brewed the swill, up from which Swine Flu had wafted, to clear their pork by-product for public consumption.
The Contessa Brewer & Melissa Francis Sweet Valley Twins act lets MSNBC set up contrived incredulity which consultants can confirm within the context of otherwise false assumptions. “Swine Flu has nothing to do with pigs, right? I mean, pigs don’t catch it, right?”
Neither Brewer nor Francis can be as dumb as they pretend. One graduated Magna Cum Laud, the other is a Harvard alumni. You might welcome an everywoman chattiness on a daytime news presentation, but playing to a lower denominator means that corporate spokesmen can relay their talking points without scrutiny.
On this program, the twin debs were perplexed by the apparent overreaction of Hong Kong officials, who quarantined a hotel, a vestage, it was determined, from their difficult experience with SARS. The MSNBC guest expert offered a further helpful obfuscation: medical researchers still don’t understand how SARS spread between hotel guests.
Thus, international scrutiny of hog production was greeted with an incurious derision. This has nothing to do with the pigs, right?
And you don’t get malaria from pools of standing water. Mosquitoes spread malaria and dengue fever among many tropical diseases. We can probably guess that Brewer, Francis and guest know that malaria control efforts center on mosquito breeding grounds.
But the guest kept up the ridicule of swine-focused measures. Egypt was trying to slaughter pigs which it considered vulnerable to the pandemic, how unfair. The expert wasn’t addressing the probable unfairness of the farmers targeted by the Egyptian government, the expert was speaking up for the poor hogs who would be slaughtered in vain. I may have mistaken a lament for lost pork chops, sooner than empathy for the misjudged pigs, but the latter seemed illogical. The poor hogs otherwise what future exactly, beside imminent slaughter?