William Aldis, a retired senior WHO official who worked on the bird flu crisis, said in a Huffington Post article from last September:
"I am concerned WHO's communications is corrupted by the fact they push the buttons in the public's brains that will raise the most funds. That is incompatible with what the organization should be doing: serving the public with technically correct factual information, pure and simple."
Louise
Voller, a journalist at the Danish Daily Information newspaper, has
reported that pharmaceutical companies are present at meetings of WHO experts,
and, that purportedly independent scientists hired by the WHO are also
consultants to the drug companies that make the vaccines.
On Tuesday, WHO's Fukuda insisted that its swine flu scientists' were not tainted by their private sector associations. The reason, he said, is that before each meeting, scientists are asked to declare all possible conflicts of interest. "These documents are gone over and examined. If there is some potential conflict of interest we go back and talk with them."
While the WHO was initially set up to rely on funding from UN member countries, in recent years, this source has been rapidly overtaken by "voluntary contributions", which are provided by the private sector, national governments, and NGOs. According to WHO's 2008-2009 budget, $958 million was supplied by the UN, while three times as much -- $3.2 billion -- came from voluntary donations.
WHO reports that only around 1% of these voluntary contributions come from the private sector, but the real total of private influence may be obscured. For example, companies can donate to foundations or NGOs which support their interests, thereby concealing the source of their contributions. According to internal WHO emails received by the British Medical Journal and described in a February 17, 2007 article, Benedetto Saraceno, the director of WHO's department of mental health and substance abuse, advised a patient group to accept money from GlaxoSmithKline and then pass it on to WHO in order to mask the money's origins.
Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg told the Council of Europe Tuesday that there has been dissent ever since the shift towards public-private partnership began in earnest in 2001.
"Already then there were very critical voices against the influence. [WHO's] administration is made of people not well paid who can't fight against the pay of people in and from the industry they are simply swept aside"[private] influence is rampant and that is why we can't understand why the WHO we used to love"has become unrecognizable to us."
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