Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 2 May 2009

My trip to Las Vegas has made me think about swine flu and mortality in general

issue 02 May 2009

Next weekend, I am planning to meet up with an old friend in Las Vegas. I have a direct flight booked with Virgin Atlantic, a reservation at the best restaurant in town and, most importantly, two tickets to Crazy Horse Paris at the MGM Grand. But in the past few days I’ve been having second thoughts. The problem is, my friend lives in Mexico City.

Just how concerned should I be about catching swine flu? According to my colleague James Delingpole, not remotely. He wrote a piece earlier this week in which he assessed the risk as vanishing-to-zero: ‘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.’ His view is that the British and American governments are deliberately whipping up their populations into a paranoid frenzy in the hope of restoring their battered authority.

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