The flu is not to be sneezed at - Telegraph.co.uk

Now Mr Lansley is under acute pressure to get the vaccination rates up fast. But a new row is brewing since – on the JCVI's advice – he is refusing to extend routine immunisation to the country's 3.8 million under-fives, even though the disease is spreading most rapidly in that age group. Last year parents were encouraged to take their small children for inoculation, but – as The Daily Telegraph revealed this week – the programme was quietly scrapped this summer on cost grounds.

The Health Secretary protests that taking action against swine flu earlier would have been "crying wolf ". But the predator existed all right, it's just that Mr Lansley did not see it lurking in the bushes. Horses – in relation to stable doors – seem to provide a better zoological parallel.

And this is only Mr Lansley's latest embarrassment. In the summer he attacked Jamie Oliver's drive for healthier school meals, and followed up by exempting big food and drinks companies from new regulations in return for helping to meet the cost of a healthy eating campaign. Worse, Downing Street has begun to have doubts about his radical NHS reforms.

His flu fiasco comes as something of a surprise, since in opposition he became rather an expert on the disease, pressing the then government for more effective action.

Flu, of course, comes round annually, normally claiming some 3,000 lives, usually among the elderly and infirm. Each year the virus undergoes a slight shift, which enables it to infect people who have built up a level of immunity from previous bouts.

Three or four times a century, however, flu takes a quantum leap when a wholly new virus, against which no one has immunity, appears out of the blue to sweep across the world. Most notoriously, the 1918/19 Spanish Flu claimed 50 million lives worldwide, more than were lost in the immediately preceding First World War, and less serious pandemics struck in 1957 and 1968.

For years, medics and governments expected the next pandemic to be another bad one, arising from the bird flu that originated in Asia that has killed a devastating 60 per cent of the 500 people it has so far infected. Instead, the disease sprung a pleasant surprise: the new virus came from pigs, not birds, from Mexico not the Far East, and seemed to be remarkably mild.

Nevertheless, the authorities prepared for the worst. Sir Liam Donaldson, the then chief medical officer, predicted that 65,000 could die, and the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic. But in August the WHO declared that the strain had "largely run its course" – and it almost certainly actually saved lives in Britain last winter by elbowing aside normal seasonal flu, which had been killing many more people.

Now it has surprised us again by
re-emerging in force. Some experts expect it to continue to spread fast, especially when children spread infection on returning to school. But – as Mr Lansley now knows – the only predictable thing about flu is its unpredictability.