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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.
For example, a study released December 7 by the Harvard School of Public Health found that the CDC predicted that H1N1 mortality rates would be 80 to 500 times higher than they turned out to be with the WHO doing only slightly better. The CDC also overshot the likelihood that pig flu causes serious illness by 7 to 9 times, the study found. Another study, done by CDC itself and published in the New England Journal of Medicine on December 31, found that swine flu was far more difficult to transmit that it had initially claimed.
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?
Should the European Council's investigations conclude that WHO deliberately incited H1N1 paranoia to help drug makers, it could spark reform of how infectious diseases are handled. The paramount questions experts will try to address are how dangerous a disease must become before a global vaccination campaign is advised, and when a disease should truly qualify as a "pandemic".
Proving that the drug industry paid WHO officials to sell swine flu will be difficult to establish, but the string of clues which points to this corruption -- as befits the trail of a wild pig -- 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.
Peter Gross, an infectious disease specialist with the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey wrote that WHO's new definition was fuzzy and might incite ill-founded panic. His September editorial in the British Medical Journal echoed epidemiologist Tom Jefferson.
Jefferson, formerly a general practitioner in the British Army who has worked for the well-respected Cochrane Collaboration for 15 years, 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. "And 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."
The opinion given by Dr. Wodarg at Tuesday's meeting is that the definition change was designed to boost vaccine sales.
"There is no other explanation for what happened. Which reasons could lead to those [WHO] decisions? I don't find any other explanation. It's not for health. And who profits? Why else would you change the definition?"
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 long poured in from all sides.
