The most pathetic headline for a long time was (need you ask?) in the Daily Mail this week: "Panic at school as girl aged 12 becomes latest swine flu victim".
The report told how a girl of 12 has become the latest and youngest Briton to be diagnosed with deadly swine flu. Hundreds of her "frightened" school friends were hurriedly innoculated with anti-viral drugs yesterday after confirmation that she had tested positive.
News that she has contracted the disease "caused panic" among pupils and parents at Paignton Community and Sports College, who said they did not know about the case until it was announced in the Commons by Gordon Brown yesterday lunchtime. "Anxious parents" rushed to the 2,000-pupil school - which will now be closed until May 11 - to find their children.
The report featured a photo of another girl, Amy Hutton-Hands, who already has a cough. Her mother said "the whole thing is a nightmare".
Charlotte Cleverdon, 11, was in her class when a teacher came in to tell pupils what was happening. 'Everyone started crying and holding their noses,' she said. 'I know the girl well. She's nice and I'm worried about her.' Another parents said 'It is frightening. Devastating and very scary. My daughter is very upset and we are off to the doctors to get her checked out.' Her daughter said 'We were told one student has swine flu. I don't want to get it. Lots of children were crying.'
Strangely, Daily Mail readers were not entirely sympathetic with the panicking Devon parents. "It's the Aporkalypse" wrote H.Mann of London, and Chris from Cheltenham said "We're all going to die. Again."
I suppose it's worth saying that the one child who is affected is said to be responding well to treatment and wasn't in school all week, anyway. Still, why let inconvenient truth stand in the way of a nice bit of hysteria?
Yesterday the BBC displayed its usual fine sense of intelligent balance when yesterday evening's Look East programme devoted an entire news item to a woman from Essex who hasn't got swine flu. Oddly they didn't refer to the fact that roughly 60 million other Britons haven't got it either.
Journalist James Delingpole of the Telegraph got it about right, we think:
Journalist dies, oinking horribly, after failing to take Swine Flu seriously
Yeah, well I suppose there's always the risk but that's just the kind of crazy, devil-may-care guy I am. So here's my prediction: I'm not going to die of swine flu, you're not going to die of swine flu, none of your friends is going to die of swine flu, none of your Mexican pen pals is going to die of swine flu. Not even if we throw caution to the wind and refuse to wear one of those blue masks the World Health Organisation now seems to consider essential if we're not all to keel over going "Soweee. Soweee. Razorback. Oink. Aaagh!"
Obviously I don't wish to be callous about the estimated 80 Mexicans who have died of the pneumonia and respiratory illness associated with the disease so far. But 80 deaths in a country where around 4 million people die every year (mostly of less newsworthy things like heart disease, cancer, road accidents and bloody drug war shootouts) hardly constitutes the next Great Plague. So why do bodies like the World Health Organisation and functionaries like the Government's Chief Medical Advisor insist on talking the disease up as if it is?
Because this is what their government paymasters want them to do. As H.L.Mencken put it: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Can you imagine the secret delight with which this swine flu threat is being greeted by embattled, increasingly unpopular leaders like Gordon Brown and Barack Obama? Besides distracting from their economic ineptitude, it enables them to pose as nurturing, caring father-figures-cum-men-of-action who are doing everything in their power to protect the health of their beloved people from this sinister viral threat.
Our job, meanwhile, is to be grateful and stump up. This health scare alone is going to cost us at least £500 million in anti-retroviral drugs which the government has been stockpiling, bought up from drug companies presumably at emergency rates, to cope with the imaginary menace.
This is the great nonsense about the much vaunted precautionary principle. It encourages "experts" to dream up the most extravagant worst case scenarios: 100 months left to save the planet from global warming; 500,000 Britons to die of vCJD; 150 million to die of bird flu; computers to be brought to a stand still by the Millennium Bug. But it never holds them to account when they get it wrong.
Imagine if all those computer experts had been held liable for the cost estimated between $300 billion and $600 billion of combating the non-existent Millennium Bug. Imagine if the scientists and government ministers who talked up BSE had been stung for the £7 billion their scare eventually cost the UK economy. Imagine if, in 50 or 100 years time the descendants of Al Gore, Dr James Hansen and Sir David King were forced to compensate the global economy for all their misleading, ruinously expensive predictions about climate change.
"And pigs might fly," you might say - if it weren't in such appalling taste.
Right on, James. We reserve a certain amount of contempt, though, for the silly parents in Paignton who were so pleased to roll over with their legs in the air when approached by reporters in search of a juicy headline. Still, to be fair I dare say there were quite a few who just said "Yes, that's right, I'm taking my children home so they can have yet another few days off school getting under my feet and lolling in front of the telly. Now, will you get out of my face, you stupid little man?" but they didn't get in the papers.
We really are turning into a nation of wimps, aren't we? The blame has to be shared between the media who over-react to every tiny thing in their desperation for attention, the place-serving government ministers and officials who spend their entire time watching their backs and making sure no one can accuse them of ignoring a potential problem - and a populace who are always ready to take what they are told at face value and wallow in juicy victimhood so everyone will feel sorry for them.
Luckily we're not all like that. Some years ago a large party of local schoolchildren and teachers were on a trip to France. One contingent of them were on a coach about half an hour from their hotel near Paris when Concorde crashed into it. The press swarmed round, but soon left them alone when they found that there were no photos of distraught children in tears to be had, because the kids were totally unfazed - they hadn't seen the crash, they'd never been to that hotel before, they didn't know any of the people who were killed, and all they knew was that it took a bit longer to get to another hotel instead.
So the press turned their attention to the children's parents waiting at home for news. Unfortunately for them, this was Suffolk where folk are pretty phlegmatic. The best quote any newspaperman was able to get out of them was "Oh yes, we know all about it. No, we're not worried at all. Someone from the County Council phoned to say they were all safe. Would you like a cup of tea?"
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