This was meant to be the pandemic they had been waiting for.

The flu virus, science tells us, continually mutates and sooner or later will create a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 outbreak which killed 50 million. Around the world scientists have been waiting, preparing for the inevitable.

Then in May 2009 swine flu emerged and they thought it could be the big one. After all, unlike the bird flu scare that preceeded it, swine flu really existed as a human to human transmission, and had killed an estimated 176 in Mexico.

By 11 June 2009 swine flu was declared a level 6 pandemic by the WHO, with predicitions of thousands of deaths to come - in fact, Sir Liam Donaldson, "bandied about any figure that came into his head, settling on "65,000 could die", peaking at 350 corpses a day" (See Guardian article).

National vaccination campaigns were being planned in many countries and governments raced to stockpile limited supplies of the vaccines. At the height of the frenzy there was tentative talk of 'mandatory vaccination' and even the more sinister question of whether 'the rights of the child to receive the benefits of the vaccine are greater than the rights of the parent to refuse' - an extreme, anti-parent, anti-liberal view that arose worryingly fast as public fear was being raised.

With fewer than expected cases and deaths in the summer people started questioning the rhetoric. We were told to prepare for a flare up as the winter took hold, but then it all went quiet. Right in the middle of the 'flu season', when it should have been at its worst the disease did not escalate as expected. The latest figures on swine flu show a “relatively stable picture” across Scotland, Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon has said. The same is true across the UK as a whole. Yesterday the BBC reports that "Weekly government briefings about swine flu have been abandoned, a signal that the crisis is considered to be easing."

Not that swine flu has not gone away, it is still killing, 13,554 across the world have died to date (the Independent) but this is not what we were led to fear, and well below annual seasonal flu deaths and nothing like the figures bandied about in the early days.

So was the over-reaction mearly a sensible precaution on the part of the health authorities? Or was there some deliberate manipulation going on?

This week, New Scientist reports that 14 governments of the Council of Europe are complaining that hey have been duped, charging that:

"Pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies... to alarm governments" in order to "promote their patented drugs and vaccines". Countries ... are now trying to limit orders and sell or give away vaccine, as demand is low.

Meanwhile, the manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank, with British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline posting sales of its swine flu vaccine products totalling £835 million. in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Whenever a vaccination campaign is launched there seems to be an increase in the number of false positive cases being reported. H1N1 was no different. At the height of the panic in early autumn 2009 a CBS News investigation discovered that of the many reported cases of swine flu in the USA fewer than 2% were actually H1N1 swine flu when tested, and that 83% of reported cases were not flu at all! The idea that reported cases were deliberately allowed to appear high is strengthened by the fact that most countries, including the USA and UK, stopped routine testing for swine flu and relied instead on verbal reporting.

We may never know whether the pharmaceutical companies deliberately over-egged the pudding, or how much their influence informed the WHO or Government decisions but the moral of this affair should be that we all emerge not with a dose of flu, or a shot of vaccine, but with a dose of healthy scepticism whenever there is a health scare with big money at stake. The House of Commons Health Committee report 'The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry' Fourth Report of Session 2004–05 makes sobering reading. In its summary it states

The interests of pharmaceutical companies and those of the public, patients and the NHS often overlap but they are not identical. For the industry, medical need must be combined with the likelihood of a reasonable return on investment. An effective regulatory regime to ensure that the industry works in the public interest is essential. Unfortunately, the present regulatory system is failing to provide this.