Schweinegrippe

Jan. 2010: Die Anhörung der WHO zur “Schweinegrippe” beim Europarat Januar 2010
Videotext von Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg: “Unter dem Titel Fake Pandemics hat der Europarat 2010 den von der Arzneimittelindustrie inszenierten Fehlalarm der WHO untersucht. Ich habe diese Untersuchung beantragt und sie als Experte begleitet. Damals hat das erste französische Fernsehprogramm diese Interviews aufgenommen und gesendet. Die verantwortliche Redakteurin war Corinne Lalo.”

21.01.2010, ZDF Frontal: Schweinegrippe – Falscher Alarm

Bis zu 10 Milliarden US-Dollar Gewinn könnten die Hersteller mit dem Impfstoff gegen die Schweinegrippe am Ende gemacht haben. Die hatte die Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO) zuvor zur Pandemie erklärt. Im Fall der Schweingrippe “kam eine uniforme Empfehlung zugunsten der Pharma- Industrie zustande”, erklärt dazu Pharmakologe Prof. Peter Schönhöfer im Interview mit Frontal21. Einige der Berater der WHO stünden auf Gehaltslisten pharmazeutischer Unternehmen.”

Nur 10% haben sich impfen lassen. Eine Mutter kommt zu Wort, daß sie ihr Kind nicht als Versuchskaninchen hergeben wollte. Heute nennen sie es “Liebe” (Kretschmer). Prostituierte sprechen auch von “Liebe machen”, interessieren sich aber gar nicht für einen…

Leider mit kleinem Aussetzer bei 1.06 Min., bessere und vollständige Fassung bleibt aufzufinden. Von wegen, das Internet vergißt nichts. Nach 10 Jahren schon. Hinzu kommt die Zensur…

Ausschnitt mit Jörg Schaaber, BUKO Pharmakampagne: “WHO änderte die Pandemie-Kriterien!”

23.01.2010, Frankfurter Rundschau: Geschäfte mit der Schweinegrippe
(nicht online verfügbar)

Komm.: Wohl über oder mit Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, da auf seiner alten wodarg.de-Webseite erwähnt.

25.01.2010, taz: Hype um Schweinegrippe: “Es stinkt nach Einfluss der Industrie”

Zitat: “Der SPD-Politiker Wodarg hat im Europarat eine Anhörung zum Hype um die Schweinegrippe erreicht. Er will wissen, warum Regierungen überreagierten und die Pharmaindustrie Milliarden verdiente. […]

Auf welche Fragen wollen Sie Antwort?

Wir wollen verstehen, wie es dazu kam, dass die WHO plötzlich die Schwelle zur Ausrufung einer Pandemie so herabgesetzt hat, dass eine ganz normale Grippewelle zum Alarm führen konnte. Und wir wollen wissen, wie das mit Verträgen zwischen Regierungen und Pharmaindustrie zusammenhing, die in Kraft treten mussten, sobald die WHO eine Pandemie ausruft. Weltweit ist so Impfstoff für rund 20 Milliarden US-Dollar verkauft worden.

Haben Sie eine Vermutung?

Es stinkt danach, dass die Industrie Einfluss auf die WHO genommen hat. Dass es sich um einen echten Fehlalarm handelt – dafür gibt es wissenschaftliche Belege. Schon 2005, 2006 war es bei der Vogelgrippe ähnlich – die wurde nie von Mensch zu Mensch übertragen. Jetzt erleben wir, dass die Schweinegrippe weit weniger Schaden anrichtet als jede normale Grippewelle. […]

Sie saßen lang im Gesundheitsausschuss – wird da so etwas diskutiert?

Ich habe das versucht. In den Instituten und vom Ministerium wurde ich höflich abgepuffert.

Viele Weichen für die Pandemie-Vorsorge sind unter Regierungen mit SPD-Beteiligung gestellt worden…

Ja, das entsetzt mich.

War Ihre Partei zu blauäugig?

Man muss unterscheiden zwischen der Partei und bürokratischen Apparaten. Aber klar: Ministerin und Staatssekretäre tragen Verantwortung. Die hätten besser auf Kritiker wie mich hören sollen, dann hätten sie viel Geld gespart.”

Komm.: Es geht nie ums Geld sparen, die werfen es mit vollen Händen zum Fenster raus… Warren Buffetts Klassenkampf gegen die Völker… Dr. Wodarg hätte besser schon 2010 die Virusbeweisfrage gestellt und die Einhaltung der verbindlichen Regeln der Wissenschaft gefordert, wie Durchführung von Kontrollexperimenten mit nicht-infiziertem Material usw.

26.01.2010: Public hearing on handling of H1N1 pandemic

A public parliamentary hearing “The handling of the H1N1 pandemic: more transparency needed?” was held during the session on 26 January. The hearing brought together representatives of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and of European vaccine manufacturers, as well as independent medical experts, to discuss this topic with parliamentarians.

The hearing was initiated by the outgoing Chair of PACE’s Sub-committee on Health Wolfgang Wodarg, who together with some other members of the Assembly of the Council of Europe requested in a motion in December that the Assembly look into this question. The hearing was open to the press. Both hearing and press conference were webcast live. Here the statement presented by Dr. Wodarg:

I would like to give you a brief status report of what has occurred over the past years and what the situation is today. We see that the population is exposed to a mild flu. People get sick as they usually do in winter season. Some have even respiratory symptoms. But the extent of all this is considerably less than in most of the previous years. Before this development and these subjective experiences within the population, we saw that last April there were very intense reports about a flu spreading in Mexico City and its region, a region with about 20 million inhabitants, i.e. a very densely populated area. Given the fact that the influenza is always a very contagious disease which spreads very rapidly and leads to a great number of cases, it was surprising to see the extent to which attention was focussed on that flu already after the reporting of only hundreds of cases. After a mere 1 000 of cases, the word ‘pandemic’ already began to be used by scientists collaborating with the administrations in charge.

I would like to give you a report on the situation of a town where I established a sentinel a few years ago, which was Flensburg, a town of less than 100 000 inhabitants. Here we were able to observe regularly how many people went to the doctor’s and had typical flu symptoms. In winter season at least 10% of the population got sick, so more than ten thousand people normally developed flu symptoms within two weeks time and among them up to 30% with an Influenza variety. In such a region -according to WHO- normally the seasonal flu goes along with 10 to 13 deadly cases attributable to influenza. In Mexico 2009 there were not even 1000 persons who had contracted the disease and about 11 attributable deaths when the panic broke out over this new flu infection. (At the beginning the administration shocked with higher death rates, which some weeks showed out to be overestimated.)

Those who are over 60 years of age hardly contracted the flu. It has become clear in the meantime that the current influenza affects young people most. There is a relatively higher number of young people who contracted this flu which is not surprising at all. Usually, when we observe a flu coming, one of the factors, which helps us determine if it is already known or not is the occurrence amongst the elderly. If they do not get sick they seem to already have immunity against the virus, may be by former infections, may be because of former vaccinations.

However, despite all this, at the end of April 2009, there were heavy discussions as to whether the pandemic plans, which had already been developed, should be implemented and at what level, because the levels of “pandemic preparedness” each have their specific consequences attached to them. Associated Press reported on May 19, 2009, that China, Britain, Japan and a dozen of other countries had urged the WHO not to use the proposed new definition of a “pandemic” and to “be very cautious about declaring the arrival of a swine flu pandemic, fearing that a premature announcement could cause worldwide panic and confusion.”

In regard to this, I have to remind, that there were doubts already about WHO’s alarm on the avian flu in 2005/2006, a bird disease which in fact has never been transmitted between humans. There had only been observed singular individual ‘zoonotic’ cases, cumulating to not even 500 worldwide. These cases were found amongst humans, who were very intensely exposed to avian flu while being in contact with sick animals. It was then officially stated by the WHO, in panic-stricken terms, that this flu could threaten mankind and that a great number of humans could fall ill and die. This is why medication worth billions of dollars was bought and stocked at the time. From a scientific view, this medication had never been clinically tested for the disease for which it was marketed, given that the avian flu had never become contagious among human beings and thus those medicines could not be tested because the disease they should be provided for did never exist.

This made me quite sceptical at the time. Since then I observed, how pandemic plans were developed in many countries and how “pandemic preparedness” was formulated and inaugurated. As a consequence of this avian flu hype many contracts between national states and pharmaceutical manufacturers were signed so as to ensure the availability of relevant vaccines in case of a real future pandemic. The pharmaceutical companies then started to establish a second line of flu vaccines for pandemic use. They developed their new vaccines by using specific patented adjuvants or breeding layers for the virus antigen to come. This was the reason, why the resulting vaccines could be monopolised by a few companies and marketed for a much higher price than those seasonal vaccines, which are traditionally produced in chicken eggs and which could be provided parallely and thus very fast by many laboratories all over the world using non-patented procedures. It seems, that the indication for the new, patented vaccines primarily followed economical strategies and was not necessary to optimise public health needs. But this should be scientifically inquired.

The supply with pandemic vaccines on the national levels was contracted in many countries including a take-over of accountability for side effects by the customer state. These contracts and marketing commitments were to take effect when a global flu pandemic was declared by the WHO. So the WHO basically held the trigger for the implementation of the pandemic preparedness plans and with this for high revenues for the involved producers of pandemic vaccines and some antiviral drugs. The contracts signed between states and pharmaceutical companies were for their majority secret because the pharmaceutical companies insisted on their non-publication. Only recently some of them were made public by whistleblowers.

The WHO by its decision to announce the pandemic therefore had a key role to play. By its announcement, it also decided on expenditures to be made from national budgets worldwide, which, according to analysts, amount to 18 billion USD. This is a lot of money which could have been used for many other health issues. Every day there are 26 000 children worldwide who die of avoidable diseases and undernourishment! This is something we need to consider when we look at the allocation of health expenditures.

On 11th June 2009, the WHO raised the level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 5 to 6 and declared a global flu pandemic. Therefore the contracts established were to take effect. The pharmaceutical companies must have been waiting for this announcement, which was made even though the flu was relatively mild. This was possible because a new definition of pandemic levels had been adopted just beforehand. I will give you the old definition of a pandemic, or of what used to be considered a pandemic, which is quoted from the National Pandemic Plan of Germany. The same criteria were used in several publications of the WHO and used to be international standard. The definition, which was used by the German health authorities in May 2007, reads as follows: “An influenza pandemic is a worldwide epidemic caused by a new strain of virus which leads to infection rates and mortality rates which exceed seasonal but similarly heavy waves of influenza by several orders of magnitude. A precondition for an influenza pandemic is the appearance of a viral subtype which had not yet circulated amongst the human population or which had occurred so long ago that no residual immunity remains amongst the population and which is capable of provoking severe illness and of disseminating effectively from one human to another.”

These various criteria did not apply to the flu that we observed arising last year. Therefore, the current “pandemic” could only be launched by changing the definition of a pandemic and by lowering the threshold for its declaration. The discussion about changing the definition along with the WHO pandemic preparedness agenda came to a head last May, when dozens of member states asked the organization to withdraw it because they were afraid of this new definition to raise panic and to lead to unjustified high expenses.

It is only this change that made it possible to transform a relatively mild flu into a worldwide pandemic, to implement relevant plans, which allowed pharmaceutical companies to transform their contracts with many governments all over the world into cash. Therefore millions of people were vaccinated for no good reason, and children were vaccinated whereas it was not even clear, if the vaccine had a positive effect on them because this was never clinically tested and proven.

The so-called “pandemic” vaccines were used. They involved higher risks than usual vaccines against seasonal flu: in some adjuvants were added and injected of which we know, that they stimulate the immune system manifold, which means that they could possibly lead to autoimmune diseases (such as multiple sclerosis) and immunological complications and stroger local side effects. New procedures were allowed onto the markets to produce vaccine products including bio-reactors using fast growing cancer-like cells. The possibility that their proteins could induce cancer when injected involuntarily as impurities to the patient has never been excluded by clinical testing, that needs a much longer observation period than excluding other side effects like allergic and acute toxic ones.

So we can see that the WHO undertook an incomprehensible action, which up to now was never justified by any scientific evidence. WHO ‘gambled away’ public confidence. It does therefore seem right that we investigate this matter within the Council of Europe to find out how the WHO could undertake such risky action in spite of lots of warning and protesting voices from scientists and national Governments. It did so in the case of the avian flu and again for the swine flu. The main questions to investigate are: Why has this been done, who is behind this, what is the core of this public-private-partnership which was introduced ten years ago, what is the role of the enterprises, who participates in relevant decision-making processes and who takes the overall responsibility?”

26.01.2010: European Parliament to Investigate WHO and “Pandemic” Scandal

The Council of Europe member states will launch an inquiry in January 2010 on the influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the global swine flu campaign, focusing especially on extent of the pharma’s industry’s influence on WHO. The Health Committee of the EU Parliament has unanimously passed a resolution calling for the inquiry.

The step is 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.

The parliament motion was introduced by Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former SPD Member of the German Bundestag and now chairman of the Health Committee of PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe). Wodarg is a medical doctor and epidemiologist, a specialist in lung disease and environmental medicine, who considers the current “pandemic” Swine Flu campaign of the WHO to be “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the Century.”^1][1]

The text of the resolution just passed by a sufficient number in the Council of Europe Parliament says among other things, “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.

The “bird-flu”-campaign (2005/06) combined with the “swine-flu”-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies.”^1][2]

The Parliamentary inquiry will look into the issue of ,,falsified pandemic” that was declared by WHO in June 2009 on the advice of its group of academic experts, SAGE, many of whose members have been documented to have intense financial ties to the same pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Novartis, who benefit from the production of drugs and untested H1N1 vaccines. They will investigate the influence of the pharma industry in creation of a worldwide campaign against the so-called H5N1 “Avian Flu” and H1N1 Swine Flu. The inquiry will be given “urgent” priority in the general assembly of the parliament.

In his official statement to the Committee, Wodarg criticized the influence of the pharma industry on scientists and officials of WHO, stating that it has led to the situation where “unnecessarily millions of healthy people are exposed to the risk of poorly tested vaccines,” and that, for a flu strain that is “vastly less harmful” than all previous flu epidemics.

Wodarg says the role of the WHO and its the pandemic emergency declaration in June needs to be the special focus of the European Parliamentary inquiry. For the first time, the WHO criteria for a pandemic was changed in April 2009 as the first Mexico cases were reported, to make not the actual risk of a disease but the number of cases of the disease basis to declare “Pandemic.”

By classifying the swine flu as pandemic, nations were compelled to implement pandemic plans and also the purchase swine flu vaccines. Because WHO is not subject to any parliamentary control, Wodarg argues it is necessary for governments to insist on accountability. The inquiry will also to look at the role of the two critical agencies in Germany  issuing guidelines on the pandemic, the Paul-Ehrlich and the Robert-Koch Institute.

F. William Engdahl is author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order.

He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net. F. William Engdahl is a frequent contributor to Global Research. “Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl”

Notes
1. Rainer Woratschka, Schweinerei mit der Grippe, Der Tagesspiegel, 16 December, 2009, accessed in http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/international/Schweinegrippe-Europarat;art123,2976433 – ersetzt durch: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/international/gesundheit-schweinerei-mit-der-grippe/1649052.html
2. Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, Motion for a Resolution and a Recommendation: Faked Pandemics – a threat for health, accessed in http://www.wodarg.de/english/2948146.html.

27.01.2010, Huffington Post: Swine Flu Didn’t Fly

For makers of the swine flu vaccine, 2009 was a year to remember. By June, CSL Limited’s annual profits had risen 63 percent over 2008. GlaxoSmithKine’s 2009 earnings spiked 30 percent in the third quarter alone, to $2.19 billion. Roche made a stunning 12 times more in the second quarter of 2009 than of 2008. But in 2010, drug companies may get their comeuppance.

On Tuesday, the Council of Europe launched an investigation into whether the World Health Organization “faked” the swine flu pandemic to boost profits for vaccine manufacturers. The inquiry, held in Strasbourg, France, vindicates a worldwide movement of insiders, experts, and elected officials who accuse the United Nations organization of misleading the world into buying millions of unnecessary vaccines.

“I have never heard such a worldwide echo to a health political action,” Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, an epidemiologist who formerly led the health committee for the Council of Europe, said at Tuesday’s hearing.

Dr. Ulrich Keil, director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology, hammered his own organization and WHO’s flu chief, Dr Keiji Fukuda, for “producing angst campaigns”.

“With SARS, with avian flu, always the predictions are wrong…Why don’t we learn from history?” Keil said. “It [swine flu] produced a lot of turmoil in the pubic and was completely exaggerated in contrast with all the really important matters we have to deal with in public health.”

Last year the World Health Organization predicted that H1N1 could infect two billion and claim hundreds of thousands of lives, while President Obama’s science advisers said the outbreak could infect up to 120 million Americans and kill 90,000. But thankfully, H1N1 turned out to be a mild flu. The type-A influenza has taken around 14,000 lives worldwide, according to World Health Organization numbers from January 22. The CDC said in December confirmed US deaths had reached 4,000, although it recently estimated that due to underreporting, the true death toll could be as high as 16,500 – a tragic sum, but less than half of what the CDC attributes to seasonal flu-related illness. In most of the northern hemisphere, hog flu has been on the decline for some about three months. New transmissions are largely contained to North Africa and South Asia, according to the WHO.

Signs swine flu wasn’t much of a killer grew throughout 2009, but WHO and most domestic health agencies around the globe chose instead to man the war bugles at full volume. The result was that governments poured tens of billions of dollars into vaccines. The US alone has spent $2 billion on the drugs and has allocated $7.5 billion in supplemental spending for H1N1 preparedness.

With the disease basically over, however, countries are stuck with millions of unused doses. French and German governments have had to cancel millions of orders of the vaccines due to falling demand and late-breaking news that European health authorities had recommended twice the necessary dosage. The CDC has dealt with the glut in another way. It now says all Americans should go and get the shot – a shift from its earlier recommendation that at-risk groups such as the young, sick, pregnant, and nurses seek injections first. But why should everyone get a shot when that the disease is petering out?

On January 22, WHO issued a statement calling allegations that it irresponsibly stoked H1N1 fears, “scientifically wrong and historically incorrect.” The statement defends figures WHO publicized on transmission rates, mortality, and the virulence of swine flu.

“The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is wrong and irresponsible. We welcome any legitimate review process that can improve our work.”

At the hearing, WHO’s flu director, Dr Keiji Fukuda, denied the accusations against WHO.

“Let me state clearly for the record – the influenza pandemic policies and responses recommended and taken by WHO were not improperly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry.”

Previously, WHO had offered scant response to allegations of corruption, but deigned to defend itself after the Council of Europe meeting was announced. The public meeting to examine accusations against WHO was set up by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which represents 800 million people in 47 countries. The Council’s January 26 meeting involved WHO officials, European drug-makers, and medical experts. PACE’s findings are expected to be announced January 29 and will likely be followed by an in-depth study and recommendations to European governments.

The hearing is just latest in a series of investigations into WHO’s propriety, which also include a 2009 Danish Parliamentary review of links between WHO expert – Albert Osterhaus – and makers of the swine flu drugs. Russian lawmaker Igor Barinov has also started an inquiry into WHO’s ties to H1N1 drug makers. In France, Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot was forced to a Paris court on January 4th over swine flu campaign irregularities – including ordering millions unnecessary vaccine doses. Demonstrations over statistical improprieties have taken place in Scotland and Canada.

Inquiries into WHO misdoing are likely to plunge deep into the statistical methods for data collection, however, it takes no expertise to see that health agencies’ data about H1N1 was wildly misleading. In addition to bad guesses about how many would die, a study released December 7 by the Harvard School of Public Health found that the WHO also estimated the deadliness of H1N1 to be 40 to 250 times higher than it was.

Proving the drug industry squeezed WHO into selling swine flu is very difficult to establish, but the string of clues which points to this corruption is not hard to follow.

Pandemic or just plain Panic?

Swine flu took center stage in June of 2009, when WHO declared H1N1 the first “pandemic” in 42 years. This move caught the eye of every health authority from Tampa to Timbuktu and revved drug company engines. But to do it, WHO had to redefine the word.

One month after swine flu appeared in April, WHO rewrote the definition of “pandemic”. Under the new meaning, a pandemic does not need to cause high numbers of death or illness. A month after changing the definition, with just 144 people dead from H1N1, the flu was given the WHO’s highest threat classification: a “stage-six pandemic alert”. By comparison, the mildest 20th Century pandemic killed a million people.

Before the change, WHO had classified a pandemic as a disease that has “simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” After the alteration, the organization’s website stated that, “Pandemics can be either mild or severe in the illness and death they cause.” In May, WHO spokesperson Natalie Boudou told CNN that the original definition was an error.

The Los Angeles Times writer Michael Fumento called the redefinition “bizarre”. “Such a declaration could render the term “flu pandemic” essentially meaningless — risking lethal public complacency if a bona fide one hits,” Fumento wrote.

Tom Jefferson, Formerly a general practitioner in the British Army who has worked for the well-respected Cochrane Collaboration for 15 years, Jefferson asked in July: “Don’t you think there’s something noteworthy about the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of pandemic?”

“The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies… They’ve built this machine around the impending pandemic,” Jefferson told Der Spiegel, a German magazine with a weekly circulation of 1 million. “There’s a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions. And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding.”

Yet the WHO stands by its decision to label H1N1 a pandemic, citing geographic spread and the virus’ novelty as its primary reasons. Moving ahead, Fukuda said his organization “will definitely consider whether we can define things better.” But some participants in Tuesday’s meeting wondered what the WHO is waiting for, since complaints have poured in from all sides.

The Associated Press reported on May 19, 2009, that China, Britain, Japan and other countries had urged WHO to “be very cautious about declaring the arrival of a swine flu pandemic, fearing that a premature announcement could cause worldwide panic and confusion.”

Critics say what was needed was not a frightful label, but hard scientific data to show how many people were getting swine flu. But on July 10, the WHO quit tracking cases of infection and told governments they should stop testing for individual cases, ostensibly because the speed of H1N1’s spread had already been confirmed.

“Rational scientific independent advice should be supreme, but there was an imperative behind this which was a financial one,” said Paul Flynn, a parliamentary representative in the UK who spoke at the Council of Europe’s hearing.

Corruption in Health Organizations?

Critics of the WHO say they promoted bad data to help drug makers get rich selling vaccines. This attack implies drug makers have a network of influence within the decision-making structure of the organization, a suggestion various officials confirm.

One high-level, long-term WHO employee who preferred to remain anonymous for job security, described the WHO as follows: “WHO is infested by corruption. There is big corruption, like the management of H1N1, and there is small corruption; and between the big and the small corruption there is [corruption] in all imaginable forms. Unfortunately, it’s not only the WHO.”

William Aldis, a retired senior WHO official who worked on the bird flu crisis, said in a Huffington Post article from September 24:

“I am concerned WHO’s communications is corrupted by the fact they push the buttons in the public’s brains that will raise the most funds. That is incompatible with what the organization should be doing: serving the public with technically correct factual information, pure and simple.”

Louise Voller, a journalist at the Danish Daily Information newspaper, has reported that pharmaceutical companies are present at meetings of WHO experts, and, that purportedly independent scientists hired by the WHO are also consultants to the drug companies that make the vaccines.

On Tuesday, WHO’s Fukuda insisted that its swine flu scientists’ were not tainted by their private sector associations. The reason, he said, is that before each meeting, scientists are asked to declare all possible conflicts of interest. “These documents are gone over and examined. If there is some potential conflict of interest we go back and talk with them.”

WHO was initially set up to rely on funding from UN member countries, in recent years, this source has been rapidly overtaken by “voluntary contributions”, which are provided by the private sector, national governments, and NGOs. According to WHO’s 2008-2009 budget, $958 million was supplied by the UN, while three times as much — $3.2 billion — came from voluntary donations.

Dr. Wodarg told the Council on Tuesday that the shift towards public-private partnership which began in earnest in 2001 puts WHO officials under extreme pressure.

“Already then there were very critical voices against the influence. [WHO’s] administration is made of people not well paid who can’t fight against the pay of people in and from the industry – they are simply swept aside…[private] influence is rampant and that is why we can’t understand why the WHO we used to love…has become unrecognizable to us.”

Whether or not WHO officials are being bought off, clearly, the capacity and incentive of drug makers to lean on science are enormous.

Pandemic Profit

All US contracts for H1N1 vaccines went to just five companies: CSL Limited, Novartis, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and MedImmune. All five also produced shots for either SARS or avian flu. When swine flu took full flight in the third quarter of 2009, these firms’ earnings skyrocketed. But according to British MP, Paul Flynn, that was part of drug-makers plan.

Prior to winning any contracts, drug makers invested $4 billion in preparations for swine flu, he said. That investment may have gone to developing and patenting new, super-fast methods to create vaccines, such as using a bio-reactor to grow viruses, said Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former health expert for the Council of Europe. These patents were key to drug industry profits, since companies can charge much more for patented drugs than un-patented ones, Wodarg said.

“If you have a patent you can monopolize…and this is what industry did…The alternative is not to have vaccines patented…By decentralizing the production you could be as fast and you wouldn’t have this small way you have to pass negotiating with one enterprise that has monopoly, or with four enterprises.”

Food and Drug agencies in Canada, the UK, France, the US and elsewhere guaranteed vaccine manufacturers that they would be shielded from any lawsuits connected to the vaccines. This enabled companies to fast-track the testing process, reducing some trials to as little as 5 days.

Wodarg and others have also voiced concern that the hastily developed vaccines are not entirely safe. Adjuvanted vaccines, which contain a kind of immune booster shown to produce auto-immune responses in some children, were sold in parts of Europe and Canada, but banned in the US.

The private research group, Markets and Markets, estimated that the global, H1N1 vaccine market will be worth over $7 billion a year by 2011.

The incredible profits associated with outbreaks have sparked a wider shift in medicine from care to profit, according to Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

“Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.”

Angell reports that the drug industry spent around 14 percent of sales profits on research and development in 2000, while spending closer to 35 percent on “marketing and administration”. How that expenditure breaks down is not public knowledge, but 35% comes out to a lot of money. For instance, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Merck alone made $287 billion in 2007, according to the 2008 Pharma Report by IMS, a market intelligence firm.

The larger question begged by health agencies’ bad data, and the media’s dutiful reporting of it, is this: if fears are overstated every time there’s a flu outbreak, when the public really does need a vaccine, who will believe the boys who cried wolf?

What’s more, should the European investigations conclude that the WHO deliberately incited H1N1 paranoia to levels beyond reason in order to help drug makers, the implication is that both the private and public sectors need better oversight before being given any greater control over health care.

27.01.2010, Deutschlandfunk: Panik oder Pandemie?
Zitat: “Wolfgang Wodarg, Arzt und sozialdemokratischer Politiker, hat im Europarat in Straßburg die Weltgesundheitsorganisation scharf attackiert: Bei der sogenannten Schweinegrippe handele es sich um eine „gefälschte Pandemie“. Ob es notwendig war, die sogenannte Schweinegrippe als hochgefährliche Pandemie einzustufen – diesen Sachverhalt will der Europarat nun klären lassen.

Von Suzanne Krause

Wolfgang Wodarg: „Im Rahmen der „pandemic preparedness“-Pläne, also der Vorbereitungspläne auf eine mögliche Pandemie, stand plötzlich das nicht mehr drin, dass es sich um eine schwere Erkrankung handeln muss und dass die Erkrankung dann auch mit höherer Sterblichkeit als sonst einhergehen muss. Das war gestrichen worden, sodass jetzt nur noch bei einer Erkrankung oder schon bei einer Erkrankung, die sich schnell ausbreitet und die mit einem neuen Virustyp verbunden ist, die Pandemie ausgerufen werden kann.“

Wodarg unterstellt: Bei der Neudefinition der Kriterien, wann eine Pandemie vorliege, habe die pharmazeutische Industrie ihre Finger im Spiel gehabt. Das weist Keiji Fukuda, bei der Weltgesundheitsorganisation zuständig für Grippe-Pandemie, vor dem Europarat strikt zurück:

„Mir liegt daran, hier Folgendes klarzustellen: die Politik und die Maßnahmen, die die WHO empfahl und umsetzte, sind nicht auf unsaubere Weise von der pharmazeutischen Industrie beeinflusst worden.“

Dennoch hat der Europarat einen Bericht beauftragt. Um zu klären, ob es notwendig war, die sogenannte Schweinegrippe als hochgefährliche Pandemie einzustufen. Wodarg setzt zudem auf die Abgeordneten des Europarats: Sie sollen das Thema in den Parlamenten der 47 Mitgliedsstaaten auf den Tisch bringen. Während in Brüssel die französische Grüne Michèle Rivasi fordert, die Europäische Kommission solle eine Untersuchungskommission einrichten. Das Thema: Management der sogenannten Schweinegrippe-Pandemie. Mag auch die Zahl der Erkrankten derzeit abflauen, die Polemik zur politischen Rechenschaft scheint in Europa im Aufwind.

28.01.2010: WHO Scientist: Swine Flu Pandemic Was “Completely Exaggerated”

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Thursday, Jan 28th, 2010

A scientist with the World Health Organisation has testified, during ongoing hearings in Strasbourg, France, that the swine flu pandemic was part of an overblown “angst campaign”, devised in conjunction with major drug companies to boost profits for vaccine manufacturers.

Professor Ulrich Keil, director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology, slammed the organization and its flu chief, Dr Keiji Fukuda while giving evidence before The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

“With SARS, with avian flu, always the predictions are wrong…Why don’t we learn from history?” Keil said. “It [swine flu] produced a lot of turmoil in the pubic and was completely exaggerated in contrast with all the really important matters we have to deal with in public health.”

The WHO adviser on heart disease, added that the decision had led to a “gigantic misallocation” of health budgets.

“We know the great killers are hypertension, smoking, high cholesterol, high body mass index, physical inactivity and low fruit and vegetable intake,” he said. “In spite of all these facts, governments instead wasted huge amounts of money by investing in pandemic scenarios whose evidence base is weak.”

PACE, a 47 nation body encompassing democratically elected members of parliament, will determine whether a “falsified pandemic” was declared by WHO in June 2009 on the advice of medical advisors, many of whom have close financial ties to the very pharmaceutical giants – GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Novartis, – that produced the H1N1 vaccines.

It will also look into the controversy surrounding the fact that two shots were initially advised when it was later revealed that one dose was entirely suitable, as well as investigating concerns over hastily developed vaccines containing adjuvants.

Pharmaceutical companies are thought to have made a profit of somewhere in the region of $7.5-$10 billion on H1N1 vaccines, recouping the billions they had invested in researching and developing pandemic vaccines after the bird flu scares in 2006 and 2007.

The worldwide death toll from H1N1 is thought to be around 13,500, just over a third of the number who die from regular flu every year in the U.S. alone.

Heading the hearings is the former chairman of the Health Committee of PACE, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg. A former German lawmaker, a medical doctor and epidemiologist. Wodarg has referred to the swine flu pandemic as “one of the greatest medical scandals of the century.”

Wodarg has pointed out that the WHO softened the definition of a pandemic from an outbreak in several continents at once with an above-average death rate, to one where the spread of the disease is constant.

[efoods]Just one month after changing the definition, and with just 144 people having died from H1N1, the flu was given the highest threat classification possible, a “stage-six pandemic alert”. By comparison, the mildest 20th Century pandemic killed a million people.

“I have never heard such a worldwide echo to a health political action,” Wodarg, an epidemiologist who formerly led the health committee for the Council of Europe, said at Tuesday’s hearing.

“It was stated in panic- stricken terms that this was a flu that could threaten humanity and a great number of humans could fall ill. This is why billions of dollars of medications were bought.” Wodarg said.

He added that the the change in definition “made it possible for the pharmaceutical industry to transform this opportunity into cash, under contracts which were mainly secret.”

“In my view, the WHO undertook an incomprehensible action, which cannot be justified by scientific evidence. The Council of Europe should investigate this to see how WHO can undertake this kind of dangerous nonsense,” said Dr Wodarg.

WHO’s flu chief, Dr Fukuda, insisted that its swine flu scientists do not have conflicts of interest owing to close links with pharmaceutical companies.

“Let me state clearly for the record – the influenza pandemic policies and responses recommended and taken by WHO were not improperly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry.” Fukuda told the inquiry.

He said those calling the epidemic fake were wrong and irresponsible.

PACE’s findings are expected to be announced January 29 and will likely be followed by an in-depth study and recommendations to European governments.

Sources for this story and further reading:

Swine Flu Didn’t Fly

Drug firms ‘drove swine flu pandemic warning to recoup £billions spent on research’

01.02.2010, BMJ: Council of Europe launches investigation into H1N1 pandemic

BMJ 2010; 340 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c641
(Published 01 February 2010) Cite this as: BMJ 2010;340:c641

A Europe wide investigation will begin this week into the World Health Organization’s decision to label the outbreak of swine flu a “pandemic,” amid allegations that it did so under pressure from drug companies looking to boost demand for their vaccines.

The inquiry, launched by the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly, will be led by the British Labour MP Paul Flynn and could be concluded as early as June.

Speaking after being appointed to the role, Mr Flynn said that he wanted to establish how WHO had assessed the risks from …