JESSE WALKER: The Swine Flu panic that wasn’t. “The fear of panic—actual panic—has shaped public policy in unfortunate ways. During a disaster, it’s not uncommon for officials to hold useful information close to their vests because they don’t want to ‘spread panic,’ even though nine decades of research have established that the public almost always remains calm in such a crisis. . . . It’s not as though there haven’t been any destructive overreactions to the H1N1 flu. It’s just that they’ve come from officials, not the general public. “