Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18216

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Hobson K
WHO Responds to Critics on Handling of H1N1 Pandemic
The Wall Street Journal 2010 Jun 10
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/06/10/who-responds-to-critics-on-handling-of-h1n1-pandemic/

Full text:

WHO has taken its jabs over how it handled the H1N1, aka swine flu, pandemic. The line of criticism goes like this: WHO hyped a not-very-deadly virus by declaring an influenza pandemic on the advice of people who had financial relationships with drug makers.

The journal BMJ last week published a feature and an editorial criticizing the organization for taking advice from experts with “declarable financial ties with drug companies that were producing antivirals and influenza vaccines,” and for failing to name the members of an emergency committee advising officials on when to declare a pandemic. Margaret Chan, WHO’s director-general, responded in a letter to the editors of BMJ Tuesday, saying names of the emergency committee members are always kept confidential until “it’s finished its work” to avoid “commercial or other influences.” And, she says, while WHO needs to better manage potential conflicts of interest, “At no time, not for one second, did commercial interests enter my decision-making.”

Today there was another response from WHO, addressing critics more generally. The group says that H1N1 did indeed meet the criteria for a pandemic, citing its status as a new virus to humans that produced unusual infection, morbidity and mortality patterns. (The notion that a pandemic must include a huge number of deaths and illnesses was never officially part of the definition, WHO says.)

Defenders of WHO have also spoken up this week. On Tuesday, Nature reported that many countries had already placed orders for vaccine before a pandemic was declared. And it said that just three of 22 scientists involved with a 2004 document on the use of antivirals and vaccines during a pandemic had declared conflicts of interest.

The Minnesota Post’s Second Opinion blog today quotes Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research Policy, who calls some of the criticisms in the BMJ and a similar report “reckless and irresponsible.” A bioethics expert from the same university says that while expertise is often found in people with industry ties, WHO needs to make those potential conflicts transparent to everyone.