Panic over SARS was public health run amok. All the public posturing took SARS out of its proper context and contributed to a scare that ultimately did more harm than the virus itself. By focusing only on worst-case scenarios regarding the spread of SARS, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control were in effect controlling the population through fear… while striving to commit massive resources to their agendas… Make people afraid, make people feel they need you to protect them, and they allow you free reign with your agenda. For SARS, fear was the central pathogen, where the risks of acquiring the new mutated cold virus were far less than the fear of being infected… Uncertainty about what the risk really was promoted the panic—seeing SARS in the news caused us to personalize it… In reality, SARS was a garden variety respiratory cold virus, nothing sexy, nothing sinister.
Marc Siegel,
False Alarm: The Truth about the Epidemic of Fear (pp. 145-7)
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