After months of government scaremongering, and using the outbreak of a distant relation of the common cold to blank out bad news about failing banks and Labour MPs being thieves, it was finally admitted that the pandemic they'd tried to make people get interested in hadn't happened.
'OK, it was a big fib', said Prime Minister Gordon Brown, while filling in his expenses claim form for a limousine trip to Brighton, 'one hundred people in a population of 60 million catching 'flu and not dying is important news. Well, it was, when people started looking closely at Labour Party expenses frauds. With the bird 'flu gone and the swine 'flu scaring no-one, we must develop a new, more scary 'flu.'
'I know! How about tyrannosaurus rex 'flu! That sounds more dangerous! Or sabre-toothed tiger 'flu. But we'd better tell the news guys to shelve the planned outbreaks of dormouse 'flu, butterfly 'flu, and aardvark measles.'
The seemingly endless ridiculous health scares have become a national joke in Britain, and don't impress the average citizen, as millions of people including this reporter had a bad dose of 'real' 'flu in the 1980s - and carried on working anyway, never mind seeing a doctor.
'Yes', the PM said, 'I know, but I need something to make me seem important, now that America decides my defence decisions, and the EU decides the domestic ones. It's almost as if I'm not important! Tell Jacqui to get printing more pointless health scare leaflets, though, don't want all us MPs ending up at our rightful place - queuing up at the nearest Job Centre.'
A child sneezed twice in Lewisham after this, causing a mass movement of politicians, journalists, and PR men - but no doctors - to Lewisham, to see if there could be yet another 'flu story ready to be invented, to take attention away from the Labour Party's criminal embezzlements. There wasn't.
