An interview with Margaret Atwood

Worried about swine flu? Think it might, just possibly, be The Beginning of the End? Think there’s a government cover-up? Well, stop that now. Margaret Atwood says so. “Governments do say, let’s not cause a panic, because the panic will be worse than the actual thing. And nine times out of ten, or 999 times out of 1,000, let us hope they are right. So you’re not going to have a Black Death, great mortality kind of thing unless it’s a set of particular circumstances, and the swine flu is not it. The avian flu wasn’t it. Sars wasn’t it. Aids isn’t it either — it’s too slow. The only kind of thing that would do that would be a mutation of the Ebola or Marburg viruses, something like that. This isn’t the big one.”