The World Health Organization’s handling of the swine flu crisis posed critical transparency problems and conflicts of interest, a top medical journal reports.
A joint investigation by the British Medical Journal and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found that three key WHO scientists who advised the stockpiling of pandemic flu drugs had financial and research ties to Roche and GlaxoSmithKline — vaccine and antiviral manufacturers who stood to profit. The advisers disclosed these links to the WHO, but the WHO never publicized the conflicts or explained how it would deal with them.
Additionally, one expert on the WHO’s secret 16-member “emergency committee” — which decides whether and when to declare a pandemic — received payment from GlaxoSmithKline in 2009. The WHO insists that committee members’ identities be kept secret in order to protect them from being targeted by drug companies, but the report scrutinizes how this kind of secrecy may hinder accountability.
Shortcomings also exist in the WHO’s estimates of deaths, the report found. H1N1 deaths fell far short of even the most conservative WHO projections, and one expert interviewed in the article said that the WHO’s estimate of 2 billion swine flu cases last year had no scientific basis. The report’s authors noted that “planning for the worst while hoping for the best” is a sensible strategy, but that the totality of their findings had uncovered issues that brought the WHO’s credibility into question.
The findings coincide with a draft assessment released today by the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, which has concluded that the WHO’s handling of the H1N1 pandemic constituted a “waste of large sums of public money, and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public.”
Yesterday, the WHO emergency committee announced that it would continue to classify H1N1 as a pandemic. Pharmaceutical companies have invested around $4 billion in developing swine flu vaccines.
According to a WHO insider, all the advisers at some time in their lives received huge donations and payments from big pharma.
That is the reason that the WHO will not disclose the names. Indeed if there was nothing to hide there would be no need to hold back with the names. the whole thing stinks from start to finish and I shall never trust the WHO ever again. Is there anything sacred any more ?
This is by far the most under reported story this year, probably because the media is as deep in big pharma as WHO.