Medicine is not my thing. A poignant comment of SARS would be completely beyond my faculties. But Claudia Rosett at the WSJ has drawn the line between tyranny and SARS.
"Former unelected president Jiang Zemin, now cast as the bad cop, is presumed to be tussling with his unelected successor, Hu Jintao, cast in this round as the good cop. The truth is that all Communist Party members who have a hand in the command of China are complicit in the system. And they still fail to grasp the principle that tyranny is wrong. They seem chiefly sorry not that they run a repressive state, prone to breed and spread trouble, but simply that in this case, they could not hide it."
In the same vein, Mark Steyn has a nice riff on socialized medicine's complicity in not stopping or identifying the disease in Toronto. Mark is tough on the health care system but he draws a devastating timeline that shows malfeasance and malpractice.
"In rural China, SARS got its start through the population’s close contact with farm animals. In Hong Kong, it was spread by casual contact in the lobby, elevators and other public areas of the Metropole Hotel. Only in Canada does the virus owe its grip on the population to the active cooperation of the medical profession. In Toronto, the system that’s supposed to protect us from infection instead infected us. They breached the most basic medical principle: first do no harm. Even after they knew it was SARS, Scarborough Grace kept making things worse."