EU Agency Complains: WHO 'Gambled Away' Public Confidence With Swine Flu Fear Mongering

by Heidi Stevenson

29 March 2010

The Vice Chair of the Council of Europe's Health Committee, Labour MP Paul Flynn, is preparing a report that states the World Health Organization (WHO) "gambled away" public confidence in its swine flu fear mongering campaign. The Guardian reports that he complains that "the discrepancy between the estimate of the numbers of people who would die from flu and the reality was dramatic".

The report states:

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.

The report also discusses concerns about members of WHO's advisory groups receiving funding from pharmaceutical corporations that profited from the faked pandemic. It further implicates the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) employees as having conflicting interests:

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 says that the inquiry has questions regarding:

...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

The report, currently in draft status and due to be completed by the end of April, concludes:

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,

Perhaps, one of these days, less credence will be placed in so-called "experts" and more will be placed in rational thinking. The cost in both money and lives by the manipulations of Big Pharma and the willing acquiescense of greedy public officials in the swine flu debacle is merely one example of a medical system run amok.

The Guardian's report can be seen here.

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