Swine flu was as elusive as WMD
Swine flu was as elusive as WMD
Simon Jenkins – Guardian.co.uk January 20, 2010
Let me recap. Six months ago I reviewed the latest bit of terrorism to
emerge from the government's Cobra bunker, courtesy of Alan Johnson,
home secretary. Swine flu was allegedly ravaging the nation. The BBC
was intoning nightly statistics on what "could" happen as "the deadly
virus" took hold. The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson,
bandied about any figure that came into his head, settling on "65,000
could die", peaking at 350 corpses a day.
Donaldson knew exactly what would happen. The media went berserk. The
World Health Organisation declared a "six-level alert" so as to
"prepare the world for an imminent attack". The happy-go-lucky
virologist, John Oxford, said half the population could be infected,
and that his lowest estimate was 6,000 dead.
The "Andromeda strain" was stalking the earth, and its first victims
were clearly scientists. Drugs were frantically stockpiled and key
workers identified as vital to be saved for humanity's future. Cobra
alerted the army. Morgues were told to stand ready. The Green party
blamed intensive pig farming. The Guardian listed "the top 10 plague
books".
If anyone dared question this drivel, they were dismissed by Donaldson
as "extremists". When people started reporting swine flu to be even
milder than ordinary flu, he accused them of complacency and told them
to "wait for next winter". He was already buying 32m masks and spending
more than £1bn on Tamiflu and vaccines. Surgeries refused entry to
those with flu symptoms, referring them to a government "hotline" where
prescription drugs were ordered to be made available without
examination or doctor's note. Who knows how many died of undiagnosed
illness as a result? Lines were instantly jammed. It was pure,
systematic government-induced panic – in which I accept that the media
played its joyful part.
This week the authorities admitted that, far from a winter upturn in
swine flu, there has been a slump. From 100,000 a week at the peak,
there were just 12,000 last week. After the coldest winter for decades,
when deaths might be expected to rise, the rate is below that of
seasonal flu. In the UK, 360 people have died under its influence, most
with prior "non-flu" conditions. Swine flu is not nice – I have had it
– but bears no relation to the government hysteria.
I accept that anyone can make a mistake, and authority has some duty to
err on the side of caution. As Alastair Campbell implied on Tuesday,
Iraq might have had weapons of mass destruction, so Blair was right to
go to war just in case. But it is reasonable to ask, as the Chilcot
inquiry is doing, why precaution on such a colossal and potentially
destructive scale was justified when those who questioned the need for
it have since been proved right. Is anyone asking about flu?
Swine flu is not the first time we have suffered this nonsense. I have
a stack of predictions by senior scientists on BSE/CJD in 1995. It
would "lead to 136,000 deaths" – a spurious exactitude used to convey
plausibility – and "could infect up to 10 million Britons". This led to
an obscene £5bn campaign of cattle destruction and compensation. When
the prediction proved wildly wrong, the government excused itself with
a classic Rumsfeld-ism: "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of
absence."
This was followed by Sars 2003, a "panic gripping the world". The World
Health Organisation declared that "One in four Britons could die". The
medical doom-monger, Dr Patrick Dixon, said that Sars had "a 25% chance
of killing tens of millions", whatever that meant. The madcap Tory
health spokesman, Liam Fox, demanded the arrest and quarantining of all
recent travellers from Asia, including 30,000 Asian students.
In the event, some 800 people died with Sars worldwide, against 21,000
who died in Britain in the seasonal flu epidemic of 1999/2000.
Undaunted, within a year the same alarmists were at work on avian flu.
With now habitual hyperbole, Donaldson predicted 50,000 deaths, with
"an upper limit", graciously conceded, of 750,000. When one dead swan
slumped on a beach in Scotland, BBC reporters went crazy as inspectors
stumbled through the seaweed, clad in anti-nuclear armour. Within a
year the horror had passed. The global mortality was put at 262, with
not one death in Britain. Another fiasco was brushed under the carpet.
The Blair government, and now Brown's, have proved adept at using scare
politics to divert attention from other troubles. During foot-and-mouth
Blair was quick to don a yellow jumpsuit for photographers and intone
as if he alone stood between an illness (that is in fact harmless to
humans) and armageddon. This time the swine flu coincided with two
other "mystery diseases", MRSA and C-difficile, which killed 10,000
Britons in 2007 alone. But those deaths lay squarely at the doors of
unclean NHS hospitals. Hence there were no scary stories or predictions
about them from Donaldson.
Donaldson and his eager virologists will doubtless stick loyally to
their predictions since it is "too early to be complacent". His allies
at the BBC did their bit on Wednesday with a Horizon programme that
turned a serious study of virology into grotesque scaremongering, with
solemn music and voices crying, "there's no escape", "this could take a
devilish turn", and "we don't even know how many viruses there are!"
Children writhed in agony from smallpox.
Mad scientist syndrome is rampant. Had these scares been disseminated
by a private firm, a local authority or a newspaper (as was anti-MMR),
they would be damned from on high with demands that heads roll. As it
is, the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies sails
gaily on, still graced by the presence of Sir Roy Anderson, who happens
also to draw a six-figure salary as a non-executive director of
GlaxoSmithKline, which made hundreds of millions from the government's
panic. Anderson, and GSK, vigorously deny any conflict of interest.
The Council of Europe's head of health, Wolfgang Wodarg, is one of the
few who have dared blow the whistle on the links between "Big Pharma"
and national and supranational agencies. He this week persuaded the
council to stage a debate on the "enormous gains" made by GSK and
others from the swine flu pandemic. He seeks details of relations
between the companies and the WHO, given that stockpile contracts kick
in the moment that organisation uses the word "pandemic". It did so for
the first time last year, with reckless alacrity.
I am not aware of the WHO or the General Medical Council or any of the
medical colleges investigating these matters, or any check on conflicts
of interest of government doctors who work for drugs companies. I am
not aware of any Whitehall or Commons committee, any National Audit
Office or competition inquiry into the supply of these drugs. All I
know is that a huge amount of health money, time and effort was last
year diverted from possibly critical therapies into what looked from
the start to be yet more terror virology.
This is why people are ever more sceptical of scientists. Why should
they believe what "experts" say when they can be so wrong and with such
impunity? Weapons of mass destruction, lethal viruses, nuclear
radiation, global warming … why should we believe a word of it? And it
is a short step from don't believe to don't care.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...elusive-as-wmd
More News