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Russian lawmaker, Igor Barinov, Chairman of the Duma Health Committee, recently launched an investigation into corrupt relations between the WHO and the pharmaceutical industry. If the investigation confirms allegations against WHO, Barinov said Russia should withdraw from the WHO.
A similar scheme for potential corruption is present at the CDC.
On June 8, just a few days before the WHO declared swine flu a pandemic, the CDC was taken over by Dr. Thomas Frieden. Prior, Frieden had been the top health official in New York City and worked overseas for the WHO. In both capacities, he was an active proponent of mass vaccinations against tuberculosis. Under Frieden's direction, the CDC announced a hefty vaccine-based response to the virus and outlined a distribution effort that some doctors say constitutes the largest vaccine experiment ever on pregnant women.
The former CDC director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, was hired by Merck in December to serve as president of the vaccine department. While in charge of the CDC, Gerberding came under intense criticism for bonuses she gave to employees who worked closely with her. And during the Bush presidency, Gerberding oversaw a drastic, multi-year revamping process at the CDC in which dozens of the organization's most respected experts quit their jobs.
The Washington Post reported on August 31, 2004 that a number of CDC officials thought the restructuring plan was "part of a larger administration effort to politicize science." In one organizational shift, vaccine safety was moved out of the domain of the National Immunization Program.
Robert A. Keegan, a high-level official, circulated a memo among the CDC's top leaders in which he revealed that employees who disagreed with official data had been "cowed into silence," the Post reported on March 6, 2005. Margaret Scarlett, who spent 15 years in the Centers' AIDS program before leaving in 2001, was quoted as saying, "Political ideology is being substituted for science."
A possible source of monetary influence by drug makers is the CDC Foundation, a nonprofit organization which raises money for the CDC's efforts through private donations.
Whether or not money is altering the WHO and CDC's data, clearly, the capacity and incentive of drug makers to lean on science are enormous.
Pandemic Profit
All US contracts for H1N1 vaccines went to just five companies: CSL Limited, Novartis, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and MedImmune. All five also produced shots for either SARS or avian flu. When the response to swine flu took full flight in the second and third quarters of 2009, these firms' earnings skyrocketed. According to British MP, Paul Flynn, that was part of drug-makers plan.
Prior to winning any contracts, drug makers invested $4 billion in preparations for swine flu, Flynn said on Tuesday. That investment may have gone to developing and patenting new, super-fast methods to create vaccines, such as using a bio-reactor to grow viruses, said Dr. Wodarg. These patents were key to drug industry profits, since companies can charge much more for patented drugs than un-patented ones.
"If you have a patent you can monopolize...and this is what industry did: invented a fast way to produce vaccines and had it patented, which is much more expensive...The alternative is not to have vaccines patented...By decentralizing the production you could be as fast and you wouldn't have this small way you have to pass negotiating with one enterprise that has monopoly, or with four enterprises. It's the economic dimension of the problem which we have to have in mind as we consider how this all happened."
Food and Drug agencies in Canada, the UK, France, the US and elsewhere guaranteed vaccine manufacturers that they would be shielded from any lawsuits connected to the vaccines. This enabled companies to fast-track the testing process, reducing some trials to as little as 5 days.
Wodarg and others have also voiced concern that the hastily developed vaccines are not entirely safe. Adjuvanted vaccines, which contain a kind of immune booster shown to produce auto-immune responses in some children, were sold in parts of Europe and Canada, but banned in the US.
The private research group, Markets and Markets, estimated that the global, H1N1 vaccine market will be worth over $7 billion a year by 2011.
Such incredible profits have sparked a wider shift in medicine from care to profit, according to Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.
