In March 2010, the Council of Europe met to discuss the handling of the 2009-10 influenza H1N1 ‘pandemic’ by member states. The handling had been criticised in an initial motion at the end of 2009 by Dr. Wolfang Wodarg, an epidemiologist and then outgoing MEP. The Council appointed the late Paul Flynn, then a Labour MP as rapporteur.
One of the first criticisms focused on the apparently shifting definition of the influenza pandemic, which WHO appeared to change and tone down in May 2009 in connection with the far-from-devastating impact of the influenza outbreak.
In the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, Peter Doshi summed up the initial controversy as follows:
Since 2003, the top of the WHO Pandemic Preparedness homepage has contained the following statement: “An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in several simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” However, on May 4th 2009, scarcely one month before the H1N1 pandemic was declared, the web page was altered in response to a query from a CNN reporter. The phrase “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” had been removed and the revised web page simply read as follows: “An influenza pandemic may occur when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity.”
The Council of Europe was highly suspicious of the changes, especially as more evidence began to emerge that there was a pandemic industry ready in waiting for the button to be pressed.
Also, the BMJ and Channel 4 investigations led to questions of how far the public and perhaps governments had been misled on the effects of antivirals. The Council wondered whether the definition changes of pandemic influenza may have enabled WHO to declare a pandemic without having to demonstrate the intensity or severity of the disease caused by the H1N1 virus.
Several key players in the saga gave evidence or prepared statements for the Council. The provisional report was published in June 2010 and the final version in 2011; it still makes for sober reading.
Perhaps the fiercest criticism was reserved for the WHO, whose Director-General took advice from an anonymous committee of experts. Their identities were not public at the time, and their disclosures were never made public.
Ironically, one state, which did not follow the general stockpiling and deployment process at the time – Poland – and adopted a low-key approach to the pandemic response fared just as well as one of the most heavily proactive states – France.
The Polish Health Minister, Dr. Ewa Kopacz, told the Council that the conditions imposed by pandemic influenza vaccine producers were unacceptable to her Government. They went something like this: if we deliver late, you pay; if they do not work, you pay; if they induce grave harm, you pay; oh, and the cost will be two to three times that of seasonal influenza vaccines.
All other European states, to our knowledge, had signed secret pre-supply agreements, but some of them slowed the rollout from September 2010 due to concerns about potential harms and the mild nature of the outbreak.
In the end, Doshi concluded that definitions had not changed, as despite a decade of ‘pandemic preparedness’, there was no universally recognised definition.
Readers are encouraged to read the Council of Europe report, where you will find some strangely familiar recurring themes. However, one of Mr. Flynn’s closing recommendations appears particularly apposite today:
For the rapporteur, the main concerns regarding the current H1N1 influenza include the proportionality of the response given to the public health threat of H1N1, the transparency of relevant decision-making processes, including the possibility of undue influence by the pharmaceutical industry and the way in which the pandemic, and the use of the precautionary principle, were communicated to member states’ governments and to the European public at large, also by the media.
John Snow said on Channel 4 News in relation to the scale of the concerns:
It is one of the greatest medical scandals of the century according to a leading health expert in Brussels. The Council of Europe Health Chief has accused major pharmaceutical firms of organising a campaign of panic and unduly influencing World Health Organisation decisions.
Dr. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack blog, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
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