Source: Brownstone Institute
by Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson
“There is a peculiar arithmetic that governs modern health reporting, one that has very little to do with actual risk. Hans Rosling captured it neatly during the 2009 swine flu episode, when he calculated a ‘news-to-death ratio’ of 8,176-to-1. In other words, for every death attributed to swine flu, there were over eight thousand news stories. Tuberculosis, by contrast, received less than 0.1 news stories per death over the same period. If that sounds absurd, it is, and yet very little has changed. Take the current hantavirus scare. A cruise ship, the MV Hondius, sits off Cape Verde. There are 7 cases in total (2 confirmed, 5 suspected) and 3 deaths …. In the past week alone, there have been at least 10 to 15 unique news stories, generating hundreds of articles.” (05/20/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-news-to-death-ratio-strikes-again/