There’s no need to panic about coronavirus

In contrast to prophets of doom, who get invited to Davos, asked to address the UN and are able to build entire careers around their scaremongering, there are few rewards for those who play down fears – even if they turn out to be correct. If there were, then perhaps I wouldn’t have to draw attention to this piece I wrote in the Spectator in September 2005 arguing that the H5N1 strain of bird flu had been hugely over-hyped and was unlikely to kill many of us.

At the time, the World Health Organisation (WHO) was predicting there could be up to 50 million deaths worldwide, and former government adviser on infectious diseases Professor Hugh Pennington was claiming that it could be worse than the Spanish flu of 1918. In the event, H5N1 went on to kill a global total of, er, 482 people. One doesn’t want to make light of those deaths, but as I pointed out in 2005, a million people a year were then dying of malaria and two million of tuberculosis – yet those diseases seemed to have disappeared from public consciousness in the West and certainly weren’t causing panic in Britain.