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?
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