LONDON, England - January 12, 2010 - The Daily Mail has revealed that the government is trying to get rid of £1billion worth of unwanted swine flu vaccine - because the deadly epidemic they were promising us all last year never materialized.
Several things are shocking about this revelation, not least the charge by the Council of Europe's head of health that major drug companies might have leaned on the World Health Organization (WHO) to stoke up last year's scare by warning that swine flu could be a worldwide pandemic killing tens of millions.
Certainly, those companies have made vast fortunes out of selling the vaccines, which at our expense now have to be flogged off at giveaway prices.
But in a way most shocking of all is that this scandalous waste of public money - and the wild overreaction that gave rise to it - was entirely predictable.
I can say this with confidence because I predicted it on this very page of the Daily Mail in April last year, just when our government, led by the Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson, was cranking up the scare-machine to fever pitch by predicting that swine flu could be as bad as the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed 50 million people worldwide.