Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17976
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Publication type: Journal Article
Ishaq GM
Was swine flu pandemic biggest medical hoax of the decade?
NetRUM Newsletter 2010 Jun; 3:(2):14
Full text:
Second week of June this year marks the first anniversary of the official declaration of the influenza A/H1N1 pandemic. On 11 June 2009 Dr Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, announced to the world’s media: “I have conferred with leading influenza experts, virologists, and public health officials. In line with procedures set out in the International Health Regulations, I have sought guidance and advice from an Emergency Committee established for this purpose. On the basis of available evidence, and these expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met…The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic.”
But one year on, governments that took advice from WHO are unwinding their vaccine contracts, and billions of dollars’ worth of stockpiled oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza)-bought from health budgets already under tight constraints-lie unused in warehouses around the world [1].
H1N1 swine flu has killed more than 18,000 people and affected some 214 countries since the virus emerged in Mexico and the US in April 2009. In India, over 1,500 have died so far. On June 3rd, 2010 India unveiled its first-ever indigenous vaccine against H1N1 influenza virus, with union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad taking the first shot in full public gaze. Created by Zydus Cadila from an H1N1 strain provided by WHO, the single-shot vaccine called Vaxiflu-S will cost a maximum of Rs 350. Cadila is ready with 4.5 lakh doses of the vaccine. Three other Indian companies are also coming up with their indigenous swine flu vaccines. Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII) has developed an H1N1 vaccine in the form of a nasal spray that would be available by the end of June, 2010 while Bharat Biotech (Hyderabad) and Panacea (Delhi) will be out with their versions of the vaccine by July and August, 2010 respectively [2].
While India is gearing up to boost its indigenous vaccine manufacturing capacity, many countries across the globe are offloading hundreds of millions of doses of unused swine flu vaccines. Countries like Greece, France and the UK have cancelled orders for vaccines that they now realize won’t be needed [3,4]. At the height of the pandemic scare last year, UK’s Chief Medical Officer had warned of up to 65000 deaths. The death toll now stands at just 251; and the UK Government is now trying to offload up to £1 billion worth of unwanted swine flu vaccines. It is widely believed that H1N1 swine flu was never too dangerous and it never should have been escalated to a level-six pandemic by the WHO in the first place. Total swine flu deaths for 2009 were far lower than the number of deaths from regular seasonal flu. And yet it turns out that thousands of Americans who died from the swine flu had been previously injected with the vaccines. In fact July 1998 issue of The American Journal of Medicine explains that as per conservative calculations approximately 107,000 patients are hospitalized annually for nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)-related gastrointestinal (GI) complications and at least 16,500 NSAID-related deaths occur each year among arthritis patients alone. Thus more people are killed annually by NSAIDs than by swine flu virus. A joint investigation by the BMJ and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has also uncovered evidence that raises troubling questions about how WHO managed conflicts of interest among the scientists who advised its pandemic planning, and about the transparency of the science underlying its advice to governments [1].
In light of these and few other startling facts, many experts worldwide now believe that the swine flu pandemic was nothing more than a big hoax and that the entire fear-based campaign was aimed at promoting the sale of vaccines. The pharma industry is expected to make between seven to 10 billion Euros in 2009 from the sales of swine flu related drugs, according to JP Morgan. In just the fourth quarter of 2009, GlaxoSmithKline shipped $1.4 billion worth of vaccines [5]. Even as questions are being raised about whether the swine flu scare was exaggerated to benefit pharma companies, evidence has surfaced that several members of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) vaccine board who pushed countries to buy the H1N1 vaccine have had significant ties with pharma companies.
Early this year a Danish newspaper “Information” revealed that more than half of the experts advising the World Health Organisation (WHO) to declare swine flu a ‘pandemic were linked to drug makers that have reaped huge profits from untested vaccines and flu drugs [6]. Eleven of the 20 members of the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) have profited from work done for the pharmaceutical industry or are linked to it through their universities. Many have declared interests in GlaxoSmithKline, the vaccine maker that stands to benefit the most from the pandemic. Among the three UK experts with industrial links is Prof. Roy Anderson, rector of Imperial College, London, also non-executive director of GlaxoSmithKline. He received £87 000 for six board meetings in 2008 and £29 000 worth of shares. The journalists from the newspaper ‘Information’ claim the public and political hysteria to swine flu is a result of an efficient public relations campaign, spearheaded by the WHO experts that have been prejudiced by pharma industry’s ready cash. This Danish newspaper also revealed, through the Danish Freedom of Information Act, that Prof. Juhani Eskola of SAGE and director of the Finnish research vaccine programme THL received nearly €6.3 million in 2009 for his research centre from GlaxoSmithKline, which was not declared on the WHO website as mandated by law [7]. Seven other WHO experts have ties with the pharmaceutical industry, most of them not declared on the WHO website. One member of SAGE, Dr. Albert Osterhaus at Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands, heads the European Scientists Fighting Influenza, and is financed by Baxter, Crucell, Novartis, Hoffmann-La Roche, MedImmune, Nobilon, Sanofi Pasteur, MSD, Glaxo SmithKline and Solvay. He was under investigation for gross conflict of interest [8], which date back to the earlier bird flu scare [9].
It is quite astonishing that in the middle of the pandemic, the SAGE group of WHO redefined ‘pandemic’ in an important way in order to mandate the mass purchase of vaccines and drugs by governments. As revealed by a renowned epidemiologist Dr. Tom Jeffrey in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in Germany [10], the old definition was a new virus, which went around quickly, for which you didn’t have immunity, and which created a high morbidity and mortality rate. Now the last two have been dropped, and that’s how swine flu has been categorized as a pandemic.
On 18 December 2009, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former SPD Member of the German Parliament and now chair of the Health Committee of Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe (PACE) introduced a motion in the European Council calling for an enquiry into the so-called “faked pandemic”. It stated that [11] “in order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide. They have made them squander tight health care resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.” It called on the member states of the Council of Europe to ask for an immediate investigation. On 31 December, Wodarg’s resolution was passed by the Parliamentary Assembly and the Health Committee of the PACE, a body representing 47 European nations including Russia, unanimously passed a resolution calling for an inquiry into the influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the global swine flu campaign, focusing especially on the extent of the industry’s influence on WHO [12]. The enquiry extends to the industry’s earlier creation of the H5N1 bird flu campaign, and was given “urgent” priority in the general assembly of the European Parliament. The step was considered to be a long-overdue move to public transparency of a “Golden Triangle” of drug corruption between WHO, the pharma industry and academic scientists that has permanently damaged the lives of millions and even caused death.
Given these facts, it seems the great swine flu hoax of 2009 is now falling apart at the seams and that the entire fear-based campaign to promote the vaccine has now been exposed as outright quackery and propaganda. Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a leading health authority in Europe, says that drug companies “organized a ‘campaign of panic’ to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic. He believes it is ‘one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century,’ and he has called for an impartial inquiry”13. He asserts that it was all a big marketing scam whose purpose was to simply sell vaccines. And it worked! Big Pharma giants made out billions of dollars in profits for the vaccine. These vaccines were, of course, paid for with taxpayer dollars, making the “Great Swine Flu Hoax of 2009” nothing more than an elaborate financial scam whose goal was to transfer wealth from the people to the shareholders of big Pharma giants14. Actually, getting the vaccine may even harm one’s health. In fact, as the long-term side effects of the vaccines remain unknown, it could turn out that the vaccines actually result in a net increase in mortality. Dr. Wodarg says that the full extent of the damage from the insufficiently-tested vaccines may not be known for years. “The vaccine developed by Novartis was produced in a bioreactor from cancerous cells, a technique that had never been used until now,” he says.
On the contrary many scientists coming out in support of WHO’s decision believe that declaring a pandemic and making vaccines were overwhelmingly the right things to do given the science and technology at our disposal. They opine that first and foremost, the notion that swine flu is not so deadly is an illusion caused by incomplete statistics: it certainly rivals normal flu, and its impact so far exceeds some previous flu pandemics; even if that were not true, the reaction was still correct. They reckon that various governments had pandemic vaccine orders in place largely because they were worried about bird flu and if this highly lethal virus starts spreading readily in people, it could be worse than the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed millions [15].
In the wake of these allegations and aspersions, in January 2010, the WHO Executive Board requested a proposal from the Director-General on how to assess the international response to the pandemic influenza, and then approved her suggestion to convene the IHR Review Committee to review both the pandemic response and the functioning of the IHR. The International Health Regulations (IHR) is an international legal agreement that is binding on 194 State parties across the globe, including all of the Member States of WHO. The basic purpose of the IHR is to help the international community prevent and respond to acute public health risks that have the potential to cross borders and threaten people worldwide. The assessment of the global response to the pandemic H1N1 will be conducted by the International Health Regulations Review Committee, a committee of experts with a broad mix of scientific expertise and practical experience in public health. The members are some of the leading experts in the world in their respective fields. The review committee held its first meeting in April, 2010 whereas a second meeting is scheduled to be held in late June 2010 and a third meeting in late September 2010. The final report will be presented to the Sixty-fourth World Health Assembly in May 2011 [16]. While the draft of this article was being finalized, a British Medical Journal (BMJ) article carried excerpts from the investigation report of the Council of Europe that heavily criticized the World Health Organization, national governments, and EU agencies for their handling of the swine flu pandemic. The parliamentary assembly of the council-the international organisation that protects human rights and the rule of law in Europe-published a draft of a report that reviewed how the H1N1 pandemic was handled. Presenting his report at a committee meeting on June 4th, 2010 in Paris, Mr Flynn said, “This was a pandemic that never really was.” The committee said there were “grave shortcomings” in the transparency of decision making about the outbreak, which generated concerns about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on decisions taken [17].
REFERENCES:
1. Conflicts of Interest – WHO and the pandemic flu “conspiracies”
Deborah Cohen, features editor, BMJ, Philip Carter, journalist, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, London. BMJ 2010;340:c2912. published June 3rd, 2010.
2. Times of India dated June 4th, 2010 accessed at
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6008648.cms
3. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE60I0RI20100119
4. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8448080.stm
5. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE60E1SU20100115?type=marketsNews
6. “Swine flu taskforce’s links to vaccine giant: more than half the experts fighting the ‘pandemic have ties to drug firms”, Fiona Macrae and Sophie Borland, Mailonline, 14 January 2010, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1243034/Swine-flu-taskforces-links-vaccine-giant-More-half-experts-fighting-pandemic-ties-drug-firms.html
7. “WHO adviser conceals a donation of millions from a pharmaceutical company”, Louise Voller and Kristian Villesen for Danish daily newspaper Information. 10 December 2009, http://www.whale.to/vaccine/who_adviser.html
8. “WHO ‘Mr. Flu’ under investigation for gross conflict of interest”, by F. William Engdahl, Financial Sense Editorials, Uncommon News & Views for the Wise
investor, 8 December 2009.
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/2009/1208.html
9. Ho MW. Where’s the bird flu pandemic? Science in Society 30, 20-21, 2006.
10. Karin Steinberger, Vogelgrippe: Der Mann mit der Vogelperspektive, Seuddeutsche Zeitung, 20 October, 2005, accessed in Seuddeutsche.de, cited in 6.
11. Faked pandemics – a threat for health. Motion for a recommendation presented by Mr. Wodarg and others http://assembly.coe.int/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc09/EDOC12110.pdf
12. “Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly to Invesigate “Pandemic” Scandal”, F. William Engdahl, Global Research . ca, 31 December 2009, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16667
13. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,582749,00.html
14. http://www.naturalnews.com/027956_H1N1_vaccine_CDC.html
15. Swine flu hoax? Get real. Debora McKenzie. New Scientist dated May 26, 2010. Magazine Issue 2761. Accessed at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627616.700-swine-flu-hoax-get-real.html
16. http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/frequently_asked_questions/review_committee/en/index.html. Report of the first meeting of the review committee available at: http://www.who.int/ihr/r_c_meeting_report_1_en.pdf
17. Council of Europe condemns “unjustified scare” over swine flu. Adrian O’Dowd, London. BMJ 2010:340:c3033 published June 7, 2010. The report, The handling of the H1N1 pandemic: more transparency needed, is at:
http://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2010/20100604_H1N1pandemic_e.pdf
