Slashdot Mirror
WHO To Investigate Handling of Swine Flu Information, Vaccine Orders
krou writes "With swine flu fading in the UK (projected winter deaths of 65,000 have been downgraded to 1,000, and new cases are decreasing) the UK government has been left with millions of unused vaccines, and (unlike its contract with Baxter) no clear break-clause to get out of its contract with GlaxoSmithKlein. Although the amount paid for vaccines has not been disclosed, it likely cost the UK government several hundred million pounds. Other governments are also in a similar position: the US ordered 251 million doses of the vaccine, and France and Germany are aiming to cut back on their orders considerably. To say that the case for the pandemic has been over-estimated appears to be an understatement. Now, the WHO has announced that it is to investigate whether or not it bowed to pressure from drugs companies to overplay the threat." (Continues, below.)
"The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly has also announced an investigation into the matter after a resolution [pdf] from Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Health, was adopted. Dr. Wodarg labelled swine flu as a "false pandemic", and claims in the resolution that '"in order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies, and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently-tested vaccines."' By some estimates, GSK was expected to net over £1 billion from vaccine sales."
So regular people weren't the only ones caught up in the sensationalism that is/was swine flu. Governments were hooked by it too...
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
it was always fear mongering. and the government shouldn't get to pass the buck either - they made the call to make the order, i'm sure they could have gotten independant advice.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I agree that it was indeed a fear-fad, but the reason behind it is fairly understandable. H1N1 hit hardest (i.e. killed people) in a different demographic than the seasonal flu; young people in generally good health. This is a demographic that does not usually feel threatened by the seasonal flu, and when this virus showed up, the threat (which in numbers are quite comparable to the seasonal flu) seemed immensely larger than reason would dictate.
This case did not only occur in the UK. Sweden bought 18 million doses, to a population of 9 million at price of about 140,000,000 USD. However, not all have been used as some refused to get it and others cannot. It is quite likely that Glax-Smith-Klein used the situation, but... What if the governments hadn't done it? And people had died as flies... Hindsights...
It seems more to me the journalists did their own fear-mongering. The politicians just followed the prevailing winds like always. I wish politicians would have more balls than that, but I also wish I could fly!
The politicians just followed the prevailing winds like always.
So much for the idea that politicians should have leadership skills.
More like ring-in-the-nose skills.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The biggest fear mongering came for news organizations, of course, since that's what they do. However right behind them was the WHO. When Swine Flu started man they went to town with panic type announcements. You read their stuff and you could see where the news organizations were getting the crap they were blowing out of proportion.
To me it seems like the WHO overreacted, people and governments bought in to it, and now they are looking for a scape goat. While I'm sure the drug companies were more than happy to sell as much vaccine as anyone wanted to buy, I've seen no evidence they were causing the panic. Seems to have stated with poor, sensationalistic stories from the WHO which were then inevitably turned in to mass doomsday stories by the media.
I have no problem with this. There was a reasonable likelihood of a megadeath sized pandemic. Appropriate steps were taken to prevent it. Some of those steps may have been unnecessary, but it didn't hurt and wasn't outrageously expensive.
The swine flue vaccination campaign in the US probably has already saved more lives than the entire Department of Homeland Security.
100% of people who caught the Swine Flu and post on Slashdot now did not die from it. Obviously it is nothing to fear.
I'm all for criticizing the pharmaceutical companies, and their mishandling of the epidemic... but the major governments of the world were eager partners in spreading fear and mis-information. Now they're trying to deflect blame.
The hysterical press is the third entity that should share in the guilt.
Think about this a little. Assume you're the person in charge of handling this crisis. There are two main variables, each with two outcomes: "do something now?" and "is H1N1 a big deal?". For the purposes of this conversation, while there may be magnitudes of "is H1N1 a big deal?", any value other than "no, not at all" is about the same as "yes, very". But this leads us to four cases:
Now look at these scenarios. First off, it should be obvious that not spending the money only "wins" in one out of four cases, and if you look at it politically, you were still gambling with peoples' lives. Second, and perhaps less obvious at first, is that it may actually be hard to tell the difference between 1 and 3. Without seeing both "do" and "do not" played out, can we tell if the vaccine was useful? Sure we may have lots left over, but ... maybe even what was used played a significant role. Compare this to Y2K; lots of money was spent, lots of work was done, and lots of systems didn't break. Was it wasted effort? Was Y2K not a credible issue?
In the end, it comes down to this: do you value money or the lives of people? You're not a doctor, but lots of credible people tell you this might be a significant problem. Do you cheap out and possibly save a few bucks, risking the lives of millions? Or do you spend a few million bucks possibly unnecessarily, to possibly save millions in the face of a credible threat?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
True. The previous H1N1 epidemic barely made a dent.
50-100m deaths, when the global population was a quarter of what it is now, is hardly anything.
You're quite right, "a small percentage of people that might have died" - 5% is, indeed, a small percentage. That'd only be a quarter of a billion deaths these days.
The orders were put in at a time when no one knew whether it going to stay relatively harmless or mutate to something as potent as the 1918-1920 version of the same virus. Even then, it took them well over six months to create enough to just cover the high risk groups. They could've waited, to be sure... But, had we not got lucky and it had mutated, that'd have been a fun six to nine months of knowing we needed a vaccine but had wasted our chance to get started. Given the choice, I'd rather err on the side of caution than save a few dollars.
I wish we had any politicians left in the west. We don't. What we have is managers. Like all managers, their primary interest is staying on the job and collecting nice salaries, at least until they've build up new and valuable connections and can hop to the next well-paying job.
The word "Politician" includes the greek "polis", which is the body of citizens, or in american terms, "we, the people". If you know of a politician actually interested in the polis, bring him to the nearest endangered species reserve.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Guys, if you prepare for a disaster and it does not actually happen, that is a good thing.
Firefighters are generally not disappointed when there's no fire.
Just because somehow you missed getting sideswiped by a big bus doesn't mean you stop wearing your seatbelt.
Simply because a ounce of prevention actually worked somehow an investigation needs to be done? It will be this type of complacence that will work against everyone during the next novel flu type.
Sorry to bring another element into this but the United States and the coalition of the willing spent billions of dollars to topple Afghanistan and Iraq, mess up Pakistan even further and now work over Yemen, because 3000 people died in 9/11, and risk the lives of countless soldiers in the name of security. And is inflicting ongoing misery to everyone in the region.
This flu has killed 10,000 Americans in a single season and somehow an investigation needs to be done, and somehow the 'panic' was hyped and 'overstated'.
So regular people weren't the only ones caught up in the sensationalism that is/was swine flu. Governments were hooked by it too...
The Dutch government ordered 34 million vaccines for 17 million people. They spent about 200 million Euro on this. Maybe half of that is used, the rest will or will not be sold to other countries. I don't mind that they spend this money. It's like an insurance, and 200 million Euro is nothing compared to the cost of having a hundreds of thousands people ill with the flu.
A flu that will kill millions of people is going to happen sooner or later. Now nothing serious has happened people are mad, but...
Shouldn't we be happy instead???
All they have to do is find out which one of these companies actually released the virus in the wilds of Mexico.
Thank you, exactly what I always thought, however this is the first instance (I come across) that someone else utters this suspicion.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
That might be OK, if we had a few competent managers, but the ones we have in the UK have stepped straight out of Dilbert. Currently we have 'transformational' government. I've tried telling them that transformational isn't even a word.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
They can't. Blame the media.
The media thrive on sensationalism, hype and fear. Some invisible killer epidemic is perfect. So they hype and blow it out of proportion as much as they can.
In comes a politician faced with two choices. Either dismiss it as the usual fear mongering or buy into it. If they dismiss it, first of all they get a lot of negative press, because they don't play along to the media hype. How dare they endanger the lives of the people! And should the near zero chance of actually the hype becoming a real threat happen, they can hope that they may still resign before some angry relatives come for their hides.
If they buy into it, they blow a shitload of tax money and that's it. Nobody is going to hold it against them when (not if) it turns out to be the usual overhyped bubble. The media won't ask why they blew the money (else they could probably ponder not to play along next time).
Same's true for the whole terror craze, by the way. Why do you think no politician dares to debunk the whole hype even if (not when) he wasn't included in the kickback package?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
fearmongering is when you pretty much know something is not a big deal, but you hype it up anyways. but we're talking about a brand new disease here. no one knows what it could have done. no one could say that there was overreacting or underreacting going on, because no one knew what swine flu had in store for us. you are not operating on fear when you consider the worst possible scenarios and the worst possible scenarios are certainly possible. and since the worst possible scenarios are so harsh, you cover all your bases and get a lot of vaccines. there's only logic and reason there, no fear in play
furthermore, who's to say the government's thorough and overpowering countermeasures all summer didn't make a difference? its like saying it was silly to waste all the money making all the buildings earthquake proof... because the earthquake came and no buildings fell down... well no shit! the quake proofing saw to that! maybe h1n1 was no big deal precisely because we reacted so swiftly and heavily
i don't know where fearmongering comes into the equation anywhere
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Governments had a big incentive too - relatively recent financial crisis was still looming in the news, so it was convenient to have a "serious" topic that would shift the attention away from their f***ups.
In some places, in Ukraine for example, the promotion of hysteria went to comical levels (but they also have presidential election now, and such things are very strong element of them there)
One that hath name thou can not otter
"institutions like the WHO must also justify their existence"
The WHO erradicated the biblical plague of smallpox from the face of the Earth and are pretty close to achieving the same thing with polio. I went to school with polio victims in the 60's and as far as I am concerned their track record more than justifies their existence.
It a pity the WHO don't have a cure for arrogance and hubris because the comments I've read so far are sickening.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.