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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."
Even if it blew a lot of government money. We were hit and hit hard by astroturfing and government fear mongering. Now that this information is becoming public this will become an annual event because government can never admit it was wrong.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Great way of shifting the blame. I mean it's pretty obvious that companies like GSK have an incentive for overplaying the threat. BUT institutions like the WHO must also justify their existence all the time thus having a similiar incentive, too. It is not just big pharma that is guilty in this case. Since the WHO (IMHO) overplayed the avian flu I've been taking their announcements with a grain of salt.
When I read a rumor that mostly fat people were dying from swine flu, it gave me the motivation to lose weight. I went from obese to normal weight in nine months. Now I feel stronger because I am not carrying around 50 pounds of ballast.
That's the only good thing that has come of the media scare about swine flu.
There is similar turmoil in many countries. I find it a bit... opportunistic. At the time the governments ordered the vaccines, the threat wasn't well assessed. Even now, we will probably not know the big picture until the medical data is carefully analyzed. Imagine the kind of reactions we would see if the situation was the opposite, a pandemic still going strong with not enough vaccines.
Common cold is also a pandemic.
If you really wanted to make your case, you should have mentioned the H1N1 flu virus is a combination of influenza strains that is very uncommon in humans, and for which most people have not been exposed before, hence the high risk of getting sick and passing the virus on. That, in combination with the possibilty of the virus mutating in something more lethal, might have become a real issue. The fact that H1N1 has spread worldwide is no surprise at all now that global travel is so common, but that alone really is not enough to warrant the total mass-hysteria that we've seen now.
Anyway, even taking into account the worst possible scenario (the H1N1 virus spreads like fire, mutates, and starts killing 10% of infected people) does not justify blindly buying millions of vaccins that were made based on the non-lethal initial H1N1 virus strain. Chances are high the current vaccin has no effect on a mutated H1N1 strain at all. So either way, something wrong is going on here.
Also, imagine how many people could have been saved using $0.50 cholera medicine, if we, the cocky, egotastic western world, wouldn't have overreacted on this disease that might even kill people in developed countries, and spent the hundreds of millions of dollars on cheap medicine for actual acute health risks around the world.
If it was a credible threat, I would agree with your analysis....However, it was not: The WHO has been issuing warning every last six years with the regularity of a swiss clock, globally, monopolizing media attention for weeks, without the fear materializing even once. This last one is probably the one too much, as it has cost a lot of money to governments in a period where it is scarce, and having a lot of unused vaccines is very bad PR.
It is clear that WHO have incentives to scaremonger continuously, it justify its own existence and can not hurt its budget allocation. However, they also continously become less and less relevant each time they shout "Wolf!". Their utility as a early warning system is thus already compromised, and I wonder if it is still worth it, and budget allocation has to be reviewed....
Now, rightfully, some investigations will occur to check if they are other incentive in the WHO alarmism, in form of accointance with vaccine producers. If it is the case, WHO higher staff has to be fired, the whole stuff reorganised, so that it regain some legitimity and start fresh without the accumulated industry/media links that kill any chance of objectivism and promote bribery...
The vaccine rush was started in the USA, where these companies are based. The US gov't was fearmongering every other day, far more often than any announcements or data from the WTO. Don't kid yourself, this scare was purchased by big pharma.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Did these stats include the massive profits that various pharmaceutical companies were raking in for selling a basically-untested "vaccine"?
A flu that will kill millions of people is going to happen sooner or later.
Why do you believe that? What evidence is there that such a thing will happen?
This is the third flu pandemic since 1920. The one in 1957-1958 killed between one and four million. The one in 1968-1969 killed around 1 million wordwide. This current pandemic (which appears to be over) is estimated to have killed just under 500,000. Notice a pattern here?
The 1918-1920 flu pandemic is always pointed to as an example of what could happen. However, that pandemic occured during World War I (which led to people being moved around the world more rapidly and to a greater extent than ever before) but before the advent of modern medicine (which I would argue began with the development of sulfa drugs in the 1930s).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
But you're not providing enough information for it to be relevant. If the normal flue kills 0.00001% of younger healthy people, and this new flu doubles the chance of a younger healthy person to die, it's still doesn't matter because it's not significant.
Show me some numbers, then start making claims. As of yet all I've heard is scare mongering.
The numbers from the initial outbreak reports were one in six. So for a country the size of the US, you could expect 1/3 to catch the flu and 1/6 of those to die - or around 16 million. That's a pretty scary number.
Of course, the early numbers turned out to be wrong. But that took a couple of months to figure out. It still turned out to have a relatively high mortality rate for flu.