WHO Losing Public Confidence After Flu Pandemic
March 31, 2010 by admin
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March 31, 2010
Guardian
By: Sarah Boseley
The World Health Organisation and other public health bodies have “gambled away” public confidence by overstating the dangers of the flu pandemic, according to a draft report to the Council of Europe.
The report, by the Labour MP Paul Flynn, vice chair of the council’s health committee, says that a loss of credibility could endanger lives.
“This decline in confidence could be risky in the future,” says the report, seen by the Guardian. “When the next pandemic arises many persons may not give full credibility to recommendations put forward by WHO and other bodies. They may refuse to be vaccinated and may put their own health and lives at risk.”
In Britain, says Flynn, the discrepancy between the estimate of the numbers of people who would die from flu and the reality was dramatic. “In the United Kingdom, the Department of Health initially announced that around 65,000 deaths were to be expected. In the meantime, by the start of 2010, this estimate was downgraded to only 1,000 fatalities. By January 2010, fewer than 5,000 persons had been registered as having caught the disease and about 360 deaths had been noted,” says his report.
The public health minister, Gillian Merron, told Flynn in a meeting for the report that a Cabinet Office investigation was looking into Britain’s handling of the outbreak and would report some time after June. Countries across Europe reacted very differently to the pandemic, says the report. Not all mounted high-profile vaccination campaigns, as did the UK.
Flynn’s draft accuses the WHO of a lack of transparency. Some members of its advisory groups are flu experts who have also received funding, especially for research projects, from pharmaceutical companies making drugs and vaccines against flu.
“The neutrality of their advice could be contested,” says the report. “To date, WHO has failed to provide convincing evidence to counter these allegations and the organisation has not published the relevant declarations of interest. Taking such a reserved position, the organisation has joined other bodies, such as the European Medicines Agency, which likewise, have still not published such documents.”
Flynn’s report was commissioned by the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly, which is holding an inquiry into the handling by European bodies and governments of the flu pandemic. The second evidence session will be held in Paris tomorrow. The witnesses will include the Polish health minister, Ewa Kopacz, who will explain why her government decided not to order any H1N1 vaccines.
At the first evidence session, in January, some experts criticised the dramatic comparisons made last year between the novel strain of H1N1 circulating in Europe and the devastating Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Professor Ulrich Keil, epidemiologist and director of the WHO collaborating centre on epidemiology of the University of Münster in Germany pointed out in evidence that the Spanish flu broke out in the very different circumstances of the first world war, where infections were easily transmitted by undernourished soldiers and there was an absence of medicines such as penicillin.
One of the central questions of the Council of Europe inquiry, says Flynn, “concerns the possibility for representatives of the pharmaceutical industry to directly influence public decisions taken with regard to the H1N1 influenza, and the question of whether some of their statements had been adopted as public health recommendations without being based on sufficient scientific evidence”. He cites as an example the decision to recommend two doses of flu vaccine for children, which was later questioned.
“Various factors have led to the suspicion that there may have been undue influence by the pharmaceutical industry, notably the possibility of conflicts of interest of experts represented in WHO advisory groups, the early stage of preparing contractual arrangements between member states and pharmaceutical companies as well as the actual profits that companies were able to realise as a result of the influenza pandemic,” says the draft report, which will be finalised when all the evidence has been taken, at the end of April.
Click here for the full report.
British Government Trying to Get Rid of Unused Swine Flu Vaccine
January 13, 2010 by admin
Filed under News Stories
January 13, 2010
Daily Mail
By Christopher Booker
So the Government, as the Daily Mail has revealed, is trying to get rid of £1billion-worth of unwanted swine flu vaccine – because the deadly epidemic they were promising us all last year never materialised.
Several things are shocking about this revelation, not least the charge by the Council of Europe’s head of health that major drug companies might have leaned on the World Health Organisation (WHO) to stoke up last year’s scare by warning that swine flu could be a worldwide ‘pandemic’ killing tens of millions.
Certainly, those companies have made vast fortunes out of selling the vaccines which, at our expense, are now having to be flogged off at give-away prices.
The Government is trying to get rid of £1billion worth of the swine flu vaccine
Worthless: The Government is trying to get rid of £1bn worth of swine flu vaccine
But in a way most shocking of all is that this scandalous waste of public money – and the wild over-reaction which gave rise to it – was entirely predictable.
I can say this with confidence because I predicted it on this very page of the Daily Mail in April last year, just when our government, led by the Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson, was cranking up the scare-machine to fever pitch by predicting that swine flu could be as bad as the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 which killed 50million people worldwide.
Even then it was clear that governments all over the world, led by the WHO, were in the grip of a hysterical panic over swine flu.
Our own government was holding emergency meetings in its ‘crisis bunker’ off Whitehall.
The BBC Today programme wheeled on a WHO ‘expert’ to predict that 40 per cent of Britons would catch swine flu, while citing another unnamed ‘expert’ as predicting that up to 1.2million of us could die.
The Government set up several special NHS centres to deal with suspected swine flu cases
The Government set up NHS centres to deal with suspected swine flu cases
A similar panic had seized politicians in America, when just one child died after a family holiday in Mexico – even though this compared with the 36,000 Americans who die each year from more conventional strains of flu.
Yet eight months later it was being reported by scientists that swine flue is only a tenth as virulent as ordinary flu, and only one-100th as virulent as that Spanish flu at the end of World War I.
In other words, swine flu – just like the bird flu which we were told by a senior WHO official in 2005 was going to kill 150 million people worldwide (the true death toll turned out to be barely 200) – has predictably turned out to be yet another example of that all-too-familiar and very dangerous disease of our time, the ‘scare phenomenon’.
Three years ago, with a food safety expert, Dr Richard North, I wrote a book called Scared To Death, a detailed study showing how scare after scare in the past 20 years has rocketed through the headlines, costing us all billions, before it was eventually revealed that they had been blown up out of all proportion and, in many cases, had no real justification at all.
Leaflets were issued to highlight the danger of contracting swine flu
Leaflets were issued to highlight the danger of contracting swine flu
Based on years of research, we traced the history of a whole sequence of such panics, ranging from those over salmonella in eggs and BSE in beef to the Millennium Bug that was supposedly going to bring civilisation to a halt at midnight on December 31, 1999, as half the world’s computers crashed.
That particular panic cost an estimated $300billion before it was discovered that the countries which hadn’t spent fortunes on sorting out their computers fared no worse than those that had.
The purpose of our book was to show how consistently these scares follow an identifiable pattern.
They invariably begin with some misreading of the scientific evidence, which then gets picked up and inflated into some major threat to human health or well being.
But the tipping point of any scare, the moment when it begins to create serious damage, is when politicians and governments get involved, buying the exaggerated threat wholesale and responding with a deluge of measures which end up costing us all billions of pounds.
Priests in Mexico pray while wearing masks intended to prevent them from contracting swine flu
Priests in Mexico pray while wearing masks intended to prevent them from contracting swine flu
Do you remember our health minister Edwina Currie in 1988 setting off that panic over salmonella in eggs, which was supposedly going to kill thousands of people because the bacteria were somehow getting inside the eggs they ate for breakfast?
Few headlines greeted the government’s admission four years later that salmonella was not getting inside eggs after all and that whatever else had caused a temporary rise in salmonella poisoning, it wasn’t eggs.
Has the Swine Flu Mutated to Become Like the 1918 Flu?
November 13, 2009 by admin
Filed under News Stories
November 13, 2009
Info Wars
Has the H1N1 swine flu virus in Ukraine mutated to become more like the 1918 Spanish flu that killed 50 to 100 million people across the globe? Just like the current H1N1 swine flu virus sweeping the globe, the 1918 Spanish flu was a virus strain of subtype H1N1. Just like the current H1N1 swine flu virus, most of the victims of the Spanish flu were healthy young adults. Now news has come out that the patients that are dying in Ukraine are experiencing the total destruction of their lungs – just like the 1918 Spanish flu.
Recombinomics has posted a translation from an announcement by the Ukraine Ministry of Health that describes what is happening to these patients and how their lungs are being absolutely destroyed by this virus:
The symptoms are observed at different stages of disease – a fever with a temperature over 38 C, cough, respiratory disorders. When cough was characterized by negligible allocation phlegm or dry unproductive cough with blotches of blood. All the patients come to hospital on average by 3-7 days of onset, were in serious condition. Period of time from onset to death averaged from 4 to 7 days. In all patients during a hospital for signs of respiratory insufficiency of various degrees, which quickly rose and manifested accelerated respiration rate, shortness of breath and effectiveness of independent breathing. X-ray studies were performed on 1-2 day hospitalization. Most patients experienced a double-headed particles of lower lung lesion, followed by a trend towards total destruction.
Reports such as this, along with the fact that the WHO has not released the sequences from the samples taken from patients in Ukraine is leading Recombinomics and others to fear that the H1N1 swine flu virus has indeed mutated and become more like the 1918 Spanish flu.
In fact, infectious disease expert Dr. Donald Lau claims that the odds of the Ukrainian pandemic virus being the exact same H1N1 virus that is infecting the rest of the world are extremely low: “The statistical probability of this being the same H1N1 virus are infinitesimally small.”
Doctors Warn Against ‘Swine Flu Parties’
June 30, 2009 by admin
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June 30, 2009
CNN
By Mark Tutton
LONDON, England (CNN) — Health experts are warning parents against holding “swine flu parties” in the hope of infecting their children with the H1N1 virus.
Talk of swine flu parties has emerged on Internet forums. The idea is that exposing a child to the H1N1 virus while it remains relatively mild will give the child immunity if the virus returns in a more virulent form later on.
The idea is an extension of chicken pox and measles parties that were once a popular way of exposing children to those diseases so that they might acquire resistance to subsequent infections.
But health officials have been quick to condemn the idea. Speaking at a conference, Dr Richard Jarvis, chairman of the British Medical Association’s public health committee, said “I have heard of reports of people throwing swine flu parties. I don’t think it is a good idea.
“I would not want it myself. It is quite a mild virus, but people still get ill and there is a risk of mortality.”
Last month, Richard Besser, the acting head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also warned against deliberately exposing people to the virus.
While it’s not clear if any swine flu parties have been held, Justine Roberts, the founder of Web site mumsnet, today told BBC Radio 4 that some people have been discussing the idea.
“We have heard of people saying ‘can we come round to your house when you get it?” she said.
“There’s definitely a prevailing view that it might be better to get it now and some people are not despairing if there is a case in their school.”
Flu epidemics often come in waves and there are fears that a more virulent form of H1N1 may strike in the fall. That happened with the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918.
Researchers at George Washington University in Washington DC have studied the 1918 pandemic and have found that in areas where there were more cases during the first wave of Spanish flu, there were fewer deaths during its second wave, in the fall of that year.
The suggestion is that exposure to the first wave of the flu conferred immunity to its second wave.
But H1N1 is still very much an unknown quantity. Experts warn that little is known about the virus and that actively encouraging its spread could risk the health of those who are most vulnerable.
While the symptoms associated with swine flu are not usually life threatening among people in good health, it can be deadly for elderly people or those with other medical conditions.
The latest figures from the World Health Organization show there have now been 311 confirmed deaths around the world from the H1N1 virus first identified in Mexico this spring, and just over 70,000 infections in 113 countries.
