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Comment by tezza | Hacker News Reader

This country ( UK ) is highly prone to mass psychosis. Not really ascribing anything negative there, just an observation.

A few winters ago there was minute by minute updates on Bird Flu.

The press was covering swans and ducks found dead on the ground. Each individual fowl corpse was covered in breathless detail amongst infographics and timelines

The government was manoeuvred into buying close to a billion pounds of Tamiflu treatment. Some of that was returned, but £500m wasn’t (thanks to commentators below )

Tamiflu killed more people that the H5N1

So may more examples beyond this

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Under £500m. Still a huge amount but considerably less than £9b.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-26954482

This isn't mass psychosis because 'seeing a drone', even when mistaken, is not a symptom of anything. 'Mass delusion' may be closer to what you're referring to. But there's a certain aspect of fear or panic in the concept that just doesn't fit here: presumably, nobody would feel panic at the sight of a far-away drone unless they were about to board a plane?

In general, I doubt the UK is any more susceptible to such phenomena (cf Americans and their panic at the sight of a turban, or beard). You may also just be profiting from the benefits of hindsight, and throwing in a conspiracy theory for what exactly?

I think it maybe that you're watching certain TV and reading certain newspapers?

I remember coverage. And no doubt the Sun had one of their helpful infographics, and the Mail blamed immigrant birds etc etc. Meanwhile most of us got on with our lives.

This is a terrible, terrible example. Tamiflu is not a vaccine, it’s a treatment. It’s use is recommended in some cases according to clinical best practices, and purchases were not due to the government being “manoeuvred”. And further, the fact that an outbreak didn’t happen doesn’t mean that planning for an outbreak is bad.

> The government was manoeuvred into buying £9 billion pounds of Tamiflu vaccine.

£9bn was about the total prescription medication budget at the time, so I think you've gone wrong somewhere.

corrected above.

The seasonal mass psychosis must be spreading.

Vaguely recall this and it was around £500m spent

The H5N1 scare was around 2008.

Some sourcing on the medication budget: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/rising-cost-medici...

> Estimated total NHS spending on medicines in England has grown from £13 billion in 2010/11 to £17.4 billion in 2016/17

A few years earlier in 2006: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/casenotes_20060509.shtml (The transcript used to be available, not sure if it's possible to get to it now, but that gives the £9bn figure).

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