Mike Adams over at Natural News just published an article claiming that swine flu (H1N1) was a hoax. He writes:

The great swine flu hoax of 2009 is now falling apart at the seams as one country after another unloads hundreds of millions of doses of unused swine flu vaccines. No informed person wants the injection anymore, and the entire fear-based campaign to promote the vaccines has now been exposed as outright quackery and propaganda.

You can read the rest of Mike's rant over at Natural News.

Now...I like Mike Adams and love his site (I even contribute to it occasionally). But sometimes Mike gets caught up in either/or thinking. In this case, it's either that swine flu is a real threat, or it must be a hyped, made-up threat to profit Big Pharma.

I'm inclined to believe a middle ground, which is this: Swine flu can be dangerous to some people. Capitalizing on that somewhat minor danger, Big Pharma hypes it up to extremes to profit from it.

I know first-hand that swine flu is real and potentially dangerous because I actually got it in October of 2009. It had been years since I'd had the flu. I did not go get a swine flu vaccine precisely because of anti-vaccine warnings from people such as Mike Adams. I already have neurological reactions to various prescription drugs, and I have chronic fatigue syndrome which affects my immune system, so I don't want to risk a vaccine.

Having made that choice, I left myself open to swine flu, which I caught probably because I take public transportation and wasn't being careful. (Now I try to avoid holding the bars on the bus with my hands - I grab them with my elbows - and I bring hand sanitizer with me.)

To say swine flu is not dangerous is absolutely not accurate. It is no walk in the park. Swine flu sucks. It hit me fast and hard, and at one point my fever got so out of control, I was starting to think I'd need to go to the emergency room. It is one of the worst flus I've ever had. Mercifully, I avoided any sort of vomiting, but it knocked me flat for weeks.

What distinguishes swine flu from regular flu is how hard it hits your lungs. I have healthy lungs, in part due to the fact that I've never been a smoker and I regularly work out my lungs with breathing exercises in yoga. I don't have asthma and it's rare I'll get any sort of chest infection. But the swine flu immediately hit my lungs with a deep down sort of infection that makes you uncomfortable even if you just twist slightly to the side. For weeks after I got over the flu, the chest infection lingered and I would cough when I did any sort of twist in my yoga practice.

My former neighbor who moved away recently has a brother who is 30 years old. Last I heard, this guy was in the hospital. He'd come down with some sort of virus (H1N1 perhaps) which developed into bronchitis and full-blown pneumonia. He was on a respirator and could not breath without help. The drugs they gave him were not helping. So they did an experimental treatment to slice open his lungs to manually scrape the fluid out of them.

And this guy is only 30 years old!

It's for this reason that we cannot immediately dismiss warnings over a virus such as H1N1 as being hype. People who have lung problems - like asthma sufferers - do need to be more careful when something like swine flu is going around.

Should those people get a vaccine though? I don't think the decision is cut and dry. We do know that vaccines can cause reactions in a small percentage of people. You could be one of the unlucky ones and end up with a serious, disabling neurological disorder thanks to the vaccine. But the chances are small, around 1%. For someone who has a history of lung problems though, it may be worth the risk.

My high school friend has a toddler with asthma problems. She was not "uninformed" about vaccines as Mike Adams might think. She did decide, however, that the risk of her daughter catching a potentially life-threatening flu was worth the risk of giving her the vaccine.

Personally, I avoid vaccines. But if there does come a day when something really fatal hits American shores, like a viable strain of Ebola, and the only way to be safe from it is to risk taking a vaccine, I'll be the first in line.

Some of the anti-vaccine crowd alleges vast conspiracies behind vaccines, telling ominous tales of vaccines being used to control or cull the population. I doubt there's any sort of substance in vaccines that could actually cause mind control or purposeful death...I'm more inclined to think that any "conspiracy" is simpler - it's just that the pharmaceutical companies want to profit off of the vaccines and thus will "hype" up the dangers of the flu. This does not mean that the vaccines do not work or are somehow contaminated with New World Order juice.

As for this idea that the swine flu hype has died down and no-one is taking the vaccines anymore...that doesn't seem to be happening where I live. I was just at the grocery store yesterday and they had a big sign up with the upcoming schedule of swine flu vaccinations. It also looks like new efforts to get people vaccinated are underway in the UK as well.

Here in Los Angeles, the lines to get swine flu vaccines were so long in the fall that people would sometimes wait all day to get one. If people aren't lining up so much now, maybe it's because they've already gotten their vaccine.

Bottom line: While I think it is good to be skeptical of flu hype, I think it is also good to be skeptical of anti-vaccine hype.

Somewhere in the middle is probably the truth.