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."

Comments

Oh, I see

[Andorin]

So regular people weren't the only ones caught up in the sensationalism that is/was swine flu. Governments were hooked by it too...

no shit sherlock

[timmarhy]

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.

Re:no shit sherlock

[John Betonschaar]

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.

I actually like swine flu

[Xenkar]

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.

Re:Fear-fad

[Tar-Alcarin]

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.

Not only UK

[G3ckoG33k]

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...

Re:That's cool!

[turbidostato]

"You know, I really love Iron Maiden... but I guess the WHO gets my vote now..."

You got it wrong, mate! We are talking about vaccines here, so it's not about *that* who, but Doctor Who.

Re:This made my day

[Carewolf]

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 WHO needs to shut the fuck up

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:The WHO needs to shut the fuck up

[nbauman]

To me it seems like the WHO overreacted, people and governments bought in to it, and now they are looking for a scape goat

To you. Are you a doctor? Are you a virologist? What the fuck do you know? Nothing. Do you think anybody in his right mind is going to risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of people by paying attention to you?

Influenza kills 50,000 people a year in the U.S., usually elderly people who are sick with something else. If that goes up or down by 10%, that's a lot of people. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 3,000 children, teenagers and young people died this year from the H1N1 flu. These are otherwise healthy young people who would not otherwise have died. A lot of them were infants under 5 years old. The vaccine seemed to have provided significant protection. It's hard to tell how many people would have died without the vaccine, but twice as many is reasonable.

3,000 deaths is the same number of people who died in the World Trade Center. Did you get upset about that? Or did you laugh it off like you're doing with the flu?

The 1918 flu caused 650,000 deaths. Nobody really knows why. We could have another epidemic like that any year. When the new flu comes up, nobody knows until it's all over whether it's going to be the big one until it's all over.

People get into a position of responsibility because unlike you, they're doctors and they know the facts. They're not going to take a chance with 3,000 lives at stake. It's a pretty easy decision: order the vaccine, and take the risk of not needing it, or don't order the vaccine, and take the risk of killing 10,000 people -- or 100,000 people -- or 650,000 people.

You're like people who say it was a waste of money to build earthquake-resistant buildings because we didn't have an earthquake. Or to build flood-resistant levies because we didn't have a flood.

You are suffering from stupidity, which is an even worse disease than the flu, and it's going around Slashdot.

I'm sorry, we really don't have any cure.

Re:The WHO needs to shut the fuck up

[mikael_j]

The 1918 flu caused 650,000 deaths.

Actually, most estimates put it at 50,000,000 to 100,000,000 deaths.

/Mikael

Re:The WHO needs to shut the fuck up

[VShael]

You're over reacting to the argument from ignorance there, chief.

The 1918 flu caused 650,000 deaths. Nobody really knows why.
It caused a lot more deaths than that, but I'll let it slide because you're probably focused on your own country.
As for "nobody really knows why", I'll assume you're also talking about your own country then, because in the rest of the world? We know why. We've got a very good understanding of the mutations that were involved in the Spanish flu of 1918. Ever since samples of the virus were excavated from bodies buried under the permafrost a few years ago.

We could have another epidemic like that any year.
We could, but it's really not very likely.

When the new flu comes up, nobody knows until it's all over whether it's going to be the big one until it's all over.
Again, maybe in your country (?) this is true, but in the rest of the world, it's not like we're reading animal entrails in a vague attempt to discern the future.

When there's an outbreak of a flu virus, samples are taken and lab tested. It takes a short time to get a gene sequence and it's often done at Mill Hill in London. Results are made public.

Any unusual mutations in the gene sequence can be highlighted and we can get a very good idea of what's likely to be a dangerous strain or not. In all the world wide panic about this recent swine flu, anyone who gave a twopenny crap could have been following actual virology websites, or the releases from Mill Hill. They were far more concerned about the variation which appeared in the Ukraine, by the way.

You are suffering from stupidity, which is an even worse disease than the flu, and it's going around Slashdot.

And you are suffering from Chicken Little syndrome.
"A disaster might happen! Something must be done!"
"'X' is something"
"Then let's do 'X'!"

Re:The WHO needs to shut the fuck up

[ivec]

I am a doctor, and like many in the medical field, I am fed-up with all the BS related to the swine flu.

Every time that news agencies (Reuters, AFP, etc) publish headlines saying "12500 deaths from the Swine flu" but omit to state in the article that the "classic" seasonal flu kills hundreds of thousands worldwide every year, this is inappropriately biased. I think we can call this fear-mongering.

Ok, the H1N1 strain might be a bit more aggressive. But the vaccine itself has also been more aggressive, and normal safety checks and clinical studies were bypassed; the vaccine injections themselves have caused hospitalizations and casualties. And many have been put under pressure to get vaccinated, even if we did not want to ("you don't get vaccinated for yourself, you get vaccinated to protect those around you..."). I am fortunate that I have been able to resist.
So the "pandemic" might have been worse, but the negative side effects of the vaccine itself might have been much more dramatic as well.

Another core issue is that we must manage risk objectively, and focus our resources (which are always limited) in the areas where are going to provide the best return, to the best of our knowledge at that point.
We have squandered billions of dollars on flu shots, benefiting the pharma industry, with a probably dubious and very short-term benefit to the people. With their powers, and leveraging WHO announcements, big pharma corporations have pulled all these funds towards them, benefiting only themselves and their shareholders.
Some flood-resistant levies and earthquake-resistant buildings are still waiting to be built. New sports facilities, more gym hours in school, promotion of healthy lifestyles, are all things which may have been better investments, providing better returns for the money.

Governments and health authorities must objectively assess which investment is likely to be the most beneficial to their community.
Because of pressure from pharma lobbies, and the leverage that the WHO has provided by declaring a pandemic, I am certain that the risks were not weighted and assessed objectively, and that precious health funds were squandered in a way that only benefited to the pharma industry.

This is not only a "hindsight is 20/20" kind of thing, but a real societal problem.
  -Ivan

This worked out OK.

[Animats]

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.

Re:This worked out OK.

[chiguy]

It's ironic that Slashdotters, who railed at managers who didn't appreciate their hard work fixing the "Y2K disaster that wasn't", are on the other side here.

It's better to prevent a catastrophe than to fix one. And because a catastrophe didn't occur may mean the preventive measures were effective.

From the numbers and trends before availability of the vaccines, this was looking to be a major health issue. *Healthy* *young* people were dying and H1N1 was active during normally dormant periods.

Record levels of vaccination, especially of school children, and the fortunate displacement of seasonal flu very likely helped make this a health policy success.

Despite this full on assault (or defense), people are still dying of H1N1. ...I haven't seen whooping cough and rubella around for a while, maybe I'll have my child skip that vaccination too...ahem

I agree with the DHS comment too...but that's offtopic

Re:This worked out OK.

[Opportunist]

The swine flue vaccination campaign in the US probably has already saved more lives than the entire Department of Homeland Security.

You say that like it's some kind of achivement. The average EMT saved more lives last year than the entire DHS since it's existance.

Better safe than sorry

[Cochonou]

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.

Re:Obligatory...

[_Sprocket_]

I-dont-know-if-its-a-pandemic is on third.

Projected Deaths

[pipingguy]

Has anyone done a comparison to deaths via peanut allergies?

Re:Fear-fad

[causality]

Lol. I never could understand why people bought into the swine flu hysteria nonsense. If you looked at the numbers for how many people actually got sick and how many died from it, IT'S JUST THE FREAKING FLU! Jeesh. I wonder what the next fear-fad will be? I'm rooting for alien invasions.

Actually that's incorrect. "Just the flu" is far deadlier each year than the swine flu has ever been in sum total. Therefore, it's even more of a non-issue to me than the regular "feel like shit for a while and get over it" influenza. The only problem, and it isn't my problem, is that it's hard to sell vaccines to people who feel this way.

Hello, think a little!

[oGMo]

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:

1. We Do Something Now; H1N1 Is a Big Deal: In this case, you ordered lots of vaccine; the pandemic still affected a lot of people, but everything that could be done, was done. You spent money. It probably saved a lot of lives.
2. We Don't Do Something Now; H1N1 Is a Big Deal: You decided to wait and see; the pandemic affected a lot of people. Millions sick. Significant fraction died. You screwed up, massive loss of life... but you didn't spend any money.
3. We Do Something Now; H1N1 Not a Big Deal: You ordered lots of vaccine; people might have been affected, but few died. You had lots of vaccine left over.
4. We Don't Do Something Now; H1N1 Not a Big Deal: You decided to wait and see; H1N1 never went anywhere, people might have been affected, but few died. You didn't spend any money.

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?

Re:Hello, think a little!

[krou]

I understand completely the scenarios you put forward, but the issue is not so much the decision made, but the information the decision was based on. Surely people are right to question whether there is a conflict of interest with regards to who is giving that information? In your scenario, the person making the decision is very, very susceptible to manipulation, because you're arguing that a decision must be made regardless of the quality or accuracy of the information.

Re:Fear-fad

[atamido]

H1N1 hit hardest (i.e. killed people) in a different demographic than the seasonal flu; young people in generally good health.

I keep hearing this from people, but everything I've read about actual numbers contradicts this. Young people in generally good health might be a little more at risk, but people with preexisting medical conditions are the ones that need to worry (which is normal).

If you have a reliable citation otherwise, I'd love to see it.

Re:This made my day

[Tom]

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.

Re:This made my day

[umghhh]

as for politicians I guess they had no real choice - WHO used its (recently changed) rules to announce a pandemic and govs had to do something as negligence in case of pending disaster would not only be deadly in political terms but criminal. And on top of this strange annoucnement by WHO (which is I suppose to be investigated now) there are cases like the one of Sir Roy M. Anderson. The whole thing stinks like an industrial swine farm hence the name of the disease.

"Overestimate" WTF?

[Arancaytar]

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.

Shouldn't we be happy?

[rvw]

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???

Re:Shouldn't we be happy?

[Baki]

The damage might be much later than the money spent/wasted now: the next pandemic, people might not take it serious anymore. Many won't let themselves be vaccinated, thinking it is another scam. Until it might actually be too late and a real nasty pandemic is happening.

Re:This made my day

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the WHO deserve a massive amount of blame themselves.

In fact, I'd put them at the core of it. It was after all Margaret Chan, the WHO's director general that came out with the quote, which was clearly idiotic even at the time of "After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.".

I mean seriously, what a load of crap. Not every pandemic comes close to putting the whole of humanity under threat, and it was pretty obvious well before she made this comment that swine flu was not deadly enough to be linked to such an absurd claim.

Mexico lost many people to it initially, and as soon as someone died from it in the US, the media went into a frenzy because it's not like of course anyone has ever died from influenza before. After the initial large death toll in Mexico. There was at no point through the spread of swine flu to the present day where the ratio of infected to death was anything worse than a typical bad flu season, since initially being at the typical bad flu season it has actually decreased, to be one of the least harmful annual flus we've had. The amount of healthy people that died to it was negligible, the deaths were almost entirely amongst those already old or weak.

Swine flu never was a threat, it was an outright scam, and the WHO were one of the major players in that scam. I would even argue their involvement was knowing and intentional- how can someone in such a prominent position as Margaret Chan not spot what anyone sensible and down to earth could? That Swine flu just wasn't doing anything serious. She's either grossly incompetent, or intentionally deceptive, either way, she's entirely unfit for the post. She needs to be sacked and replaced by someone who can actually treat such situations with an air of common sense and objectivity, and who can look at the facts before trying to rate the likes of swine flu as something that could whipe out the whole of humanity.

Re:This made my day

[Opportunist]

Really? I thought politician came from poly, i.e. many and tic, i.e. blood sucking pests.

I love /., you always learn something new every day. Though, personally, I think my description is better for the current kind of politician.

Re:This made my day

[Opportunist]

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?

Re:Fear-fad

[Fzz]

Me, my eldest son, the neighbours' three kids, and their mother all got swine flu around the end of November. Not too surprising as the kids all play together. We're all pretty healthy active people. Of the six of us, four had relatively mild flu - not nice, but not a big deal. One of the neighbours' kids and I got it a lot worse. The flu itself was very unpleasant, but the bigger issue was the whole series of secondary infections that followed on afterwards. I'm finally getting properly well again now, six weeks later, but I'm still on antibiotics. The neighbour's kid is still advised by his doctor to stay off sports, but he's mostly recovered now too.

Having seen what it can be like for healthy people, and that most of us have no immunity to this version, I'm really happy they did order lots of vaccine. I'd hate to think what it would be like if you did have some health problem. I've got an appointment to get my youngest son vaccinated on Monday. Maybe the risk is over, maybe it's not. Either way, I think it makes sense. If another H1N1 pandemic comes along in a few years time, maybe he'll have a little immunity the way the over-60s seem to have had for this one.

Re:This made my day

[s122604]

"as for politicians I guess they had no real choice" - Exactly I you recall, right wing pundits were putting out feelers that Swine flu might be "Obama's Katrina" back in November when it looked like the epidemic was spinning up and we didn't have enough vaccines. So, if epidemic gets bad, "Obama's Katrina" If the epidemic levels off (due in no small part to vaccination efforts), "LOL, you overreacted"... As to the virulence question, yes, the chances of dieing of H1N1 are remote, the chances of getting very sick, less so, but still highly unlikely. However, the profile of the disease, killing/hurting people in the prime of life, even when they were otherwise healthy, was FAR more pronounced than "regular" flu... Concern was the proper response.

Re:Shifting the blame?

[TapeCutter]

"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.