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The Associated Press reported on May 19, 2009, that China, Britain, Japan and other countries had urged WHO to "be very cautious about declaring the arrival of a swine flu pandemic, fearing that a premature announcement could cause worldwide panic and confusion."
Critics say what was needed was not a frightful label, but hard scientific data to show how many people were getting swine flu.
"Rational scientific independent advice should be supreme, but there was an imperative behind this which was a financial one," said Paul Flynn, a parliamentary representative in the UK who spoke at the Council of Europe's hearing.
Unfortunately, good data on H1N1 does not exist, not even for a retrospective review. On July 10, the WHO quit tracking cases of infection and told governments they should stop testing for individual cases, ostensibly because the speed of H1N1's spread had already been confirmed.
Following that advice, in mid-2009, the CDC decided laboratory tests to confirm whether patients had H1N1 were no longer necessary, and advised doctors to save resources and stop conducting them. A CBS news investigation found "overwhelming" evidence that despite the inflammatory estimations of the CDC, very few flu cases being reported were of the H1N1 strain, as little as three percent in California.
In response to questions about the CBS story, CDC media spokesman Jeff Dimond said: "We, as a matter of policy, do not comment on stories by other publications."
As of July 24, the CDC has used a statistical multiplier to come up with its total count of H1N1 cases meaning it inflates confirmed cases using estimates about the number of infected who people never go to the doctor or are never tested during visits. In mid-December, using this model, CDC approximated that as many as 80 million, or some 1 in 4 Americans had gotten swine flu. But with no flu-strain tests to cross-check, virtually anything that looks like a bad cold could end up in that total.
The Sky is Falling"Again
Considering the WHO and CDC's abysmal track record foreseeing the severity of flu outbreaks, it's surprising so many doctors bought their story.
For example, nail-biting projections about SARS, the 2002-2003 respiratory disease, led the world to spend $80 billion to stop an emergence that ultimately killed just 800 people made 8,000 sick. In 2005, avian, or bird flu, cost the US government a billion dollars in vaccines and billions more in preparation for future outbreaks. The WHO warned it could kill 150 million people, yet the Hitchcock-esque ailment felled just 250 people worldwide.
But swine flu was different, right? Well, early on at least, it was natural to suspect a nightmare scenario: a repeat of the Spanish flu.
Swine flu looks a lot like Spanish flu, which began in pigs and killed between 40 and 100 million people from 1918 to 1919. H1N1 shows three of the key traits which made the Spanish flu so dangerous: our immune systems aren't used to the virus, which is a new mutation; the flu can be passed from human to human; and, it has triggered immune responses in young people, not just the vulnerable elderly, according to Dr. Dawn Motyka, a vaccination expert in Santa Cruz, California.
Despite apparent similarities between the two flu's, a cursory look at history should have made the medical community more skeptical.
Characteristics akin to Spanish flu also sparked vaccination campaigns during the last two flu pandemics in 1957 and 1968, but neither of these outbreaks turned out to be major killers. The 1976 US swine flu epidemic, which refers to a domestic disease that kills a relatively high number of people, killed just one person. The hurried vaccine rollout however, killed 30 and cost the government $500 million in today's money. It also led hundreds more people to contract the crippling Guillian-Barre syndrome.
Perhaps doctors went along with the sloppily-conceived H1N1 vaccination campaign because they tend to see vaccines as the single greatest lifesaver in modern medicine. The general medical view is that administering vaccines is a wise precaution, especially when dealing with a disease that could mutate into a mass killer. But critics say this concern has to be balanced against the loss of public confidence in health authorities, should a disease end up a blowout; the risk of side-effects in recipients of scantily tested drugs; and, the enormous cost of vaccines.
In retrospect, more doctors acknowledge that swine flu was over-sold. The Intelligence firm Synovate released a survey of physicians on January 26, 2010 which found that 61 percent of all physicians in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, US, China, Taiwan and India felt the media over-dramatized the H1N1 pandemic.
