Swine flu pandemic - a nice conspiracy theory video - but based on more fact than most

Godfrey Bloom with his recollections of previous health scares and the baleful role of Sir Liam Donaldson. Ah Sir Liam, the Chief Medical Officer, always there with a scary prediction and seemingly always wrong. How I remember the fear when he warned that the death toll in Britain from bird flu would most likely be 50,000 but that a figure of 750,000 was ‘not impossible’. The actual death toll was .... zero. How about BSE, I seem to remember predictions of 400,000 deaths from this disease, how many in fact died? Less than 200 I believe. What about SARS, remember SARS, Sir Liam once suggested that hundreds of thousands of British people "could" die from SARS, although this time he did add the proviso that the actual figure "could be lower" although it also "could be higher". Oddly enough he was right... it was lower, somewhere not too far from zero.

So when Sir Liam Donaldson predicts that 40 people a day could die from swine flu, people remember the last scare and the one before that and the one before that, and so wonder why the government always want us scared of something... and thus conspiracy theories abound.