CDC Panel Calls for Flu Vaccine for All
February 26, 2010
The Washington Post
By Mike Stobbe
A government panel is now recommending that virtually all Americans get a flu shot each year, starting this fall.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had gradually been expanding its recommendation for flu shots – 85 percent of Americans were already included.
On Wednesday, the panel voted to recommend a seasonal flu vaccination for everyone except babies younger than 6 months and those with egg allergies or other unusual conditions.
The panel’s recommendation now goes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC usually follows the panel’s advice and spreads the message to doctors and hospitals across the country.
“Now no one should say ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’” said Dr. Anthony Fiore, a CDC flu specialist.
CDC vaccination recommendations tend to be influential with the doctors who give the shots and the health insurers who pay for them.
Flu shots are already recommended for 85 percent of the U.S. public, including pregnant women, children older than 6 months, adults 50 and older, people with certain chronic health conditions, health care workers and those who take care of people in a recommended group. The only people who weren’t specifically included were healthy people ages 19 to 49 who don’t have close contact with anyone at risk of flu and its complications.
But only about 33 percent of Americans actually get a flu shot, and unusually millions and millions of doses get thrown away annually.
The swine flu pandemic that hit last year caused a new momentum for flu vaccinations. Virtually all the 114 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine doses made were distributed, and more young adults and children got the swine flu vaccine than usually come out for seasonal flu.
The panel voted 11 to 0 – with one abstention – for the recommendation, prompting a short round of applause in the CDC auditorium where the meeting was held. Some public health experts and physicians had been pushing for a universal flu vaccination recommendation for more than 10 years.
Also on Wednesday, the panel gave its nod to a proposed formulation of next year’s seasonal flu vaccine. The vaccine will be built to protect against three strains of flu scientists think will be circulating next fall and winter. Swine flu is to be one of the strains incorporated into the vaccine.
At past meetings, the panel stopped short of recommending flu shots for everyone. Panel members were mindful of a history of temporary flu vaccine shortages in the United States. They worried a universal recommendation might cause demand to far surpass supply and endanger those at the highest risk of life-threatening flu complications.
Click here for the full report
The Pushing of Annual Flu Vaccinations
February 26, 2010
The Washington Post
By Mike Stobbe
A government panel is now recommending that virtually all Americans get a flu shot each year, starting this fall.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had gradually been expanding its recommendation for flu shots – 85 percent of Americans were already included.
On Wednesday, the panel voted to recommend a seasonal flu vaccination for everyone except babies younger than 6 months and those with egg allergies or other unusual conditions.
The panel’s recommendation now goes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC usually follows the panel’s advice and spreads the message to doctors and hospitals across the country.
“Now no one should say ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’” said Dr. Anthony Fiore, a CDC flu specialist.
CDC vaccination recommendations tend to be influential with the doctors who give the shots and the health insurers who pay for them.
Flu shots are already recommended for 85 percent of the U.S. public, including pregnant women, children older than 6 months, adults 50 and older, people with certain chronic health conditions, health care workers and those who take care of people in a recommended group. The only people who weren’t specifically included were healthy people ages 19 to 49 who don’t have close contact with anyone at risk of flu and its complications.
But only about 33 percent of Americans actually get a flu shot, and unusually millions and millions of doses get thrown away annually.
The swine flu pandemic that hit last year caused a new momentum for flu vaccinations. Virtually all the 114 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine doses made were distributed, and more young adults and children got the swine flu vaccine than usually come out for seasonal flu.
The panel voted 11 to 0 – with one abstention – for the recommendation, prompting a short round of applause in the CDC auditorium where the meeting was held. Some public health experts and physicians had been pushing for a universal flu vaccination recommendation for more than 10 years.
Also on Wednesday, the panel gave its nod to a proposed formulation of next year’s seasonal flu vaccine. The vaccine will be built to protect against three strains of flu scientists think will be circulating next fall and winter. Swine flu is to be one of the strains incorporated into the vaccine.
At past meetings, the panel stopped short of recommending flu shots for everyone. Panel members were mindful of a history of temporary flu vaccine shortages in the United States. They worried a universal recommendation might cause demand to far surpass supply and endanger those at the highest risk of life-threatening flu complications.
Click here for the full report
CDC Calls For Flu Vaccine For All
February 26, 2010
WEbMD
By Daniel J. DeNoon
Everybody, not just those at risk of complications, should get a yearly flu shot, the CDC’s immunization advisory panel says.
The CDC almost certainly will make universal flu vaccination official U.S. policy for this fall’s 2010-2011 flu season, as it consistently follows the advice of the panel of outside experts, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
Now flu vaccination will be advised even for healthy adults ages 19 to 49 who do not come into contact with infants or elderly people, who are at highest risk of flu complications.
That’s only 15% of the U.S. population. But the ACIP say the effect of the universal recommendation will affect far more people. That’s because a lot of people for whom the flu vaccine already is recommended don’t think of themselves as being at high risk.
Moreover, the universal recommendation simplifies the extremely complicated current recommendations that create confusion about who should and should not be vaccinated. And it makes it likely that insurers will cover flu shots for all healthy adults.
ACIP members also said that the universal recommendation would assure Americans that the nation’s public health experts are fully confident in the safety and effectiveness of the flu vaccine — particularly the H1N1 swine flu vaccine.
The 2010-2011 seasonal flu vaccine will include the H1N1 swine flu vaccine, as the pandemic virus appears to have replaced the seasonal H1N1 virus covered by previous vaccines. The new seasonal vaccine will also include protection against the predominant “Perth” H3N2 type A and “Brisbane” type B flus.
Click here for the full report
WHO: Pandemic Has Yet to Peak
February 24, 2010
comcast.net
The pandemic of H1N1 swine flu has not yet peaked, a committee of experts advised the World Health Organization on Tuesday.
“The committee advised that it was premature to conclude that all parts of the world have experienced peak transmission of the H1N1 pandemic influenza and that additional time and information was needed to provide expert advice on the status of the pandemic,” WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said by e-mail.
WHO planned a news conference for Wednesday.
The United Nations agency declared last June that the new virus was causing the first influenza pandemic in more than 40 years after it spread around the world from Mexico and the United States in just six weeks.
Under WHO rules the emergency committee, composed of 15 experts and headed by Australian John MacKenzie, makes confidential recommendations to WHO director-general Dr. Margaret Chan.
She is then required to inform the health ministries of WHO’s 192 member states and the Vatican of her decision. The WHO’s decision will be announced formally by the WHO’s top flu expert Dr. Keiji Fukuda on Wednesday at 1000 GMT.
WHO has confirmed the virus has killed 16,000 people but notes this is a gross underestimate, as hardly any patients are diagnosed or tested. It will take a year or two after the pandemic ends to establish the true death toll, the WHO says.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does projections based on testing and patterns of disease reports and projects that H1N1 has killed up to 17,000 people in the United States alone, and put as many as 370,000 into the hospital with serious illness.
In contrast, seasonal influenza kills 250,000 to 500,000 people globally but most are frail and elderly. H1N1 has attacked young adults and children.
SUBSTANTIAL OUTBREAKS
The pandemic sparked a race to develop new vaccines by drug makers including GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis but has proved to be of moderate severity, and many people failed to take the new vaccine.
Previous influenza pandemics have had waves of disease activity spread over months, meaning the post-peak period could last quite a while, according to the WHO.
The final stage, called the post-pandemic period, is when disease activity returns to levels normally seen for seasonal influenza, it says.
“There is no on and off switch for a pandemic. It’s not a single event. What we have to see is that the behavior of the H1N1 virus becomes like the behavior of other seasonal viruses,” Hartl said earlier on Tuesday.
“At the moment, it is still causing substantial outbreaks of disease outside the normal influenza seasons and affecting groups who are not normally affected by seasonal influenza. So as long as that continues, it does not behave like seasonal influenza.”
Younger people, especially those with chronic medical conditions, and pregnant women continue to be at a higher risk of infection and viral pneumonia from the H1N1 virus, Fukuda told reporters last week.
The WHO has cautioned that the H1N1 virus could still mutate or mix with the more deadly bird flu virus, which remains endemic in poultry in many Asian countries.
Click here for the full report
Deadly Hybrid Flu Possible
February 22, 2010
HealthDay News
Research in mice suggests the avian flu virus and the ordinary seasonal flu virus could combine to create a new deadly kind of flu, researchers say.
A single bit of genetic material from the seasonal virus converted the avian flu — officially known as H5N1 — into a very dangerous form, the scientists report in a study published in the Feb. 22-26 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Some hybrids between H5N1 virus and seasonal influenza viruses were more pathogenic than the original H5N1 viruses. That is worrisome,” study senior author Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a news release.
Avian flu, also known as bird flu, has killed 262 people, according to the World Health Organization, but it hasn’t become very infectious between people.
The researchers warn that swine flu — H1N1 — could also play a role in viral combinations.
“With the new pandemic H1N1 virus, people sort of forgot about H5N1 avian influenza. But the reality is that H5N1 avian virus is still out there,” Kawaoka said. “Our data suggests that it is possible there may be reassortment between H5N1 and pandemic H1N1 that can create a more pathogenic H5N1 virus.”
Click here for the full report
WHO Advising Swine Flu Vaccine to be Combined With Regular Flu Vaccine
February 22, 2010
Associated Press
The World Health Organization is recommending that swine flu be added to the regular flu vaccine next season.
WHO said in a statement Thursday that it held a meeting this week to decide which flu strains should be recommended to drug makers for their vaccines during the northern hemisphere’s next flu season, which begins in the fall.
Flu vaccines have three virus strains — which experts decide on after estimating which strains made the most people sick last season.
Last year, the swine flu pandemic virus, or H1N1, emerged too late to be added to the regular flu vaccine and a new vaccine was needed.
Click here for the full report
CDC Says Swine Flu Killed 17,000 in U.S.
February 15th, 2010
infowars.com
By Neka Sehgal
According to new estimates by the U.S. heath authorities, the dreaded H1N1 pandemic, which has shown sustained human-to-human transmission since its outbreak in April may have killed close to 17,120 people.
The new report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides an assessment of infections, hospitalizations and deaths from H1N1 since its emergence in April until mid January.
It estimates 57 million citizens have been infected by the virus since the outbreak and the total could be as high as 84 million.
Younger generation hit hard by virus
Unlike the regular flu that strikes the elderly more viciously, the report shows the circulating virus targeted the younger generation, comprising kids, teens and adults.
Click here for the full report
Swine Flu ‘Pandemic’ Was a Hoax
February 11, 2010
Prison Planet
By Paul Jospeh Watson
Appearing on The Alex Jones Show, outgoing Chair of the Council of Europe’s Sub-committee on Health Wolfgang Wodarg said that his panel’s investigation into the 2009 swine flu outbreak has found that the pandemic was a fake hoax manufactured by pharmaceutical companies in league with the WHO to make vast profits while endangering public health.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a 47 nation body encompassing democratically elected members of parliament, began hearings last month to investigate whether the H1N1 swine flu pandemic was falsified or exaggerated in an attempt to profit from vaccine sales.
Wodarg said that governments were “threatened” by special interest groups within the pharmaceutical industry as well as the WHO to buy the vaccines and inject their populations without any reasonable scientific reason for doing so, and yet in countries like Germany and France only around 6 per cent took the vaccine despite enough being available to cover 90 per cent of the population.
Wodarg said he was alarmed when the WHO cited early cases in Mexico as a threat and quickly moved to pandemic status, despite the fact that the cases were relatively mild and the virus was not new.
“This was the mildest flu ever and the people were much more clever than the government so we have to find out what was going on with WHO – why did they do this pandemic alarm,” asked Wodarg, noting that pharmaceutical interests within the World Health Organization were instrumental in creating the panic and reaping the financial dividends.
“We don’t know what really happened, we only know that they changed the definition of a pandemic, which was a very dangerous thing before and now is just a normal flu, and this is why business for pharmaceutical companies was open,” said Wodarg, adding that select pharmaceutical companies were handed a monopoly on creating the vaccine.
“It is their trick that they always try to monopolize this and we pay much more like this,” said Wodarg, noting that if patents were left open, vaccines would be produced much quicker and far cheaper.
Wodarg said there was “no other explanation” for what happened than the fact that the WHO worked in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to manufacture the panic in order to generate vast profits, agreeing with host Alex Jones that the entire farce was a hoax.
He also explained how health authorities were “already waiting for something to happen” before the pandemic started and then exploited the virus for their own purposes.
Wodarg said that the investigation was likely to recommend an end to the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies on public health institutions in Europe.
However, Wodarg pointed out, “There is no law for WHO, there is no one who punishes those people in WHO, we only have national law, so this is very important that we collect the information and on the national level we try to find those people responsible and we try to punish them.”
“Have investigations, have a deep look, we cannot tolerate such a development, we cannot have this next winter again, we don’t want such fake pandemics,” concluded Wodarg.
Wodarg said that vast quantities of unused vaccines were now being dumped on the third world and that other countries were simply trying to push ahead with vaccination programs even though the virus has proven not to be a major threat.
“The Japanese bought vaccines for 110 million people and they cannot return from this vaccine contract so they are in a very big political dilemma now and they already have problems because the Japanese people already know it wouldn’t be necessary to get vaccinated,” Wodarg told The Alex Jones Show.
Click here for the full report
The Swine Flu “Pandemic” is Over
February 5, 2010
Mail Online
By Jenny Hope
The swine flu pandemic, which has cost the nation more than £1billion, was declared over yesterday.
With the number of new cases plummeting, health chiefs announced the 24-hour flu helpline will close down next Thursday.
Critics said the seven-month outbreak had been mishandled by ministers and health officials, who had made a flawed assessment of the threat.
Swine flu has killed 411 Britons, with 124 more still in hospital – yet the 5,000 cases a week are far below the average for seasonal flu.
Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson had warned the pandemic might claim 65,000 lives and Health Secretary Andy Burnham said 100,000 could be struck down with the disease every day.
Total cases stand at 800,000 so far. Around the world, an estimated 14,000 deaths have been reported – a fraction of the number dying each year from ordinary flu.
The Government is thought to have ordered tens of millions of doses of vaccine.
So far only 4.25million have been administered to priority groups in England.
Sir Liam is still urging the vulnerable to have the jabs.
He insists the vast cost of tackling the pandemic has been justified, from the £1billion cost of vaccines and antivirals to the £10.4million spent on publicity.
The National Pandemic Flu Service, which cost a further £13.5million to run, allowed patients to bypass their GP and collect antiviral drugs after a telephone assessment. Launched in July last year and employing 1,500 call centre staff, it led to 1.1million courses of antivirals being administered to patients – many of whom never had swine flu, according to research.
Anyone suspecting they have swine flu can still get antiviral drugs from their GP, while those in at-risk groups, including children under five, can receive a vaccination.
Sir Liam said: ‘When the virus returns I would very much like to see young children already protected.
‘From now on, most deaths from the pandemic flu virus should be regarded as potentially preventable.’
A spokesman for the Department of Health said: ‘Our priority remains to vaccinate those most at risk from swine flu, as people are still in hospital from the virus.
‘This is the first time we have had a vaccine to protect people while a pandemic virus has been circulating, so it has undoubtedly helped us save lives.’
However, the bumper revenues being reported by vaccine manufacturers – £4billion in windfall profits is predicted – have led to claims that the World Health Organisation fell under the influence of the industry when it declared a pandemic last June.
Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers’ Alliance said: ‘The Government’s reaction to swine flu has proved to be excessive and poorly managed.
‘It beggars belief that they could have signed so many massive contracts with such a flawed assessment of the threat.’
But John Oxford, professor of virology at Bart’s and The London Hospital, defended the flu strategy.
‘Swine flu is behaving in a classic Darwinian fashion – the survival of the fittest – and has already displaced 98 per cent of the other flu viruses,’ he said.
‘My worry is that when it gets into the elderly next year, we could see many more deaths.
‘We should be proud that Britain responded in a way that prevented many more cases and deaths.’
Click here for the full report
Swine Flu Pandemic Was a Hoax
February5, 2010
Infowars
By Paul Joseph Watson
Appearing on The Alex Jones Show, outgoing Chair of the Council of Europe’s Sub-committee on Health Wolfgang Wodarg said that his panel’s investigation into the 2009 swine flu outbreak has found that the pandemic was a fake hoax manufactured by pharmaceutical companies in league with the WHO to make vast profits while endangering public health.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a 47 nation body encompassing democratically elected members of parliament, began hearings last month to investigate whether the H1N1 swine flu pandemic was falsified or exaggerated in an attempt to profit from vaccine sales.
Wodarg said that governments were “threatened” by special interest groups within the pharmaceutical industry as well as the WHO to buy the vaccines and inject their populations without any reasonable scientific reason for doing so, and yet in countries like Germany and France only around 6 per cent took the vaccine despite enough being available to cover 90 per cent of the population.
Wodarg said he was alarmed when the WHO cited early cases in Mexico as a threat and quickly moved to pandemic status, despite the fact that the cases were relatively mild and the virus was not new.
“This was the mildest flu ever and the people were much more clever than the government so we have to find out what was going on with WHO – why did they do this pandemic alarm,” asked Wodarg, noting that pharmaceutical interests within the World Health Organization were instrumental in creating the panic and reaping the financial dividends.
“We don’t know what really happened, we only know that they changed the definition of a pandemic, which was a very dangerous thing before and now is just a normal flu, and this is why business for pharmaceutical companies was open,” said Wodarg, adding that select pharmaceutical companies were handed a monopoly on creating the vaccine.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
“It is their trick that they always try to monopolize this and we pay much more like this,” said Wodarg, noting that if patents were left open, vaccines would be produced much quicker and far cheaper.
Wodarg said there was “no other explanation” for what happened than the fact that the WHO worked in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to manufacture the panic in order to generate vast profits, agreeing with host Alex Jones that the entire farce was a hoax.
He also explained how health authorities were “already waiting for something to happen” before the pandemic started and then exploited the virus for their own purposes.
Wodarg said that the investigation was likely to recommend an end to the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies on public health institutions in Europe.
However, Wodarg pointed out, “There is no law for WHO, there is no one who punishes those people in WHO, we only have national law, so this is very important that we collect the information and on the national level we try to find those people responsible and we try to punish them.”
“Have investigations, have a deep look, we cannot tolerate such a development, we cannot have this next winter again, we don’t want such fake pandemics,” concluded Wodarg.
Wodarg said that vast quantities of unused vaccines were now being dumped on the third world and that other countries were simply trying to push ahead with vaccination programs even though the virus has proven not to be a major threat.
“The Japanese bought vaccines for 110 million people and they cannot return from this vaccine contract so they are in a very big political dilemma now and they already have problems because the Japanese people already know it wouldn’t be necessary to get vaccinated,” Wodarg told The Alex Jones Show.
