Simon Jenkins is right on the money. Writing in last Wednesday’s Guardian he lays into all the doomsayers jumping on the “swine ‘flu” bandwagon. Just the headline says it all:

Swine flu? A panic stoked in order to posture and spend
Despite the hysteria, the risk to Britons’ health is tiny – but that news won’t sell papers or drugs, or justify the WHO’s budget

As that suggests Jenkins is highly critical of governments; medics and scientists (who, let’s face it, advise governments and have careers to nurture); the WHO; and the pharmaceutical manufacturers (who have big profits to make). He starts with a full-on rapier thrust at government:

Appropriately panicked, on Monday ministers plunged into their Cobra bunker beneath Whitehall to prepare for the worst. Had Tony Blair been about they would have worn germ warfare suits. British government is barking mad.

But he also says:

We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of “news” or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round. They cannot set a statistic in context. They cannot relate bad news from Mexico to the risk that inevitably surrounds their lives.

And then even more tellingly …

Meanwhile a real pestilence, MRSA and C difficile, was taking hold in hospitals. It was suppressed by the medical profession because it appeared that they themselves might be to blame. These diseases have played a role in thousands of deaths

[…]

MRSA and C difficile are not like swine flu, an opportunity for public figures to scare and posture and spend money. They are diseases for which the government is to blame.

It seems to me the real diseases underlying all this appear to be vested interests and public hysteria.

You can read Simon Jenkins’s full article here.