WHO scandal Paid swine flu panic?

WHO authors of the pandemic guidelines were on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies? According to British journalists, at least three scientists are said to have been on the payroll of "GlaxoSmithKline" and "Roche". Has these payments made swine flu hysteria possible??

(05.06.2010) What British journalists have found could become one of the biggest scandals of recent years. Many critical journalists and citizens have known it for a long time: was the swine flu panic paid by the influential pharmaceutical lobby to sell vaccines better?

In 2004, the World Health Organization "WHO" published guidelines on how countries should prevent and respond to a pandemic. These WHO guidelines have resulted in tens of billions of euros being spent on vaccines and medicines. These medicines should prevent a swine flu pandemic. In the end, the swine flu H1N1 turned out to be harmless, in contrast to the seasonal flu wave.

According to a study by the journal British Medical Journal and the British Journalists Association Bureau of Investigative Journalism, WHO authors of the pandemic guidelines were paid by the pharmaceutical industry. At least three WHO scientists were on the payroll of the pharmaceutical companies "GlaxoSmithKline" and "Roche". Both companies profited significantly from the sales of the medicines "Tamiflu" and "Relenza", which were used to "contain the swine flu" and were stored.

According to estimates by the Munich epidemiologist Ulrich Keil, the Federal Republic of Germany has spent about one billion euros on vaccines and medicines. Germany ordered 50 million doses of vaccine, of which very few were actually used. In the United Kingdom huge reserves of medicine were built, which cost the English taxpayer about 1.2 billion euros. And all this for a swine flu pandemic that has never really broken out. For example, the vaccines are now being stored away in governments' asylums and the pharmaceutical industry has made healthy profits. Governments around the world have reserved $ 5.8 billion worth of medicines and vaccines from pharmaceutical companies.

Again and again, panic reports were published in the press, the "upcoming swine flu" could claim tens of millions of deaths. In the end, around 18,000 people worldwide have died of the swine flu, although it is still unclear whether all the deceased were actually infected with the H1N1 virus. For comparison, in Germany, according to the Berlin virologist Detlev H. Kruger every year about 20,000 people die from the "normal" flu. Several months ago, numerous doctors and health experts of the WHO boss Margaret Chan threw the situation wrongly. The recent scandal, if this should actually turn out to be true, underlines this criticism in particular. (Sb)

Read on this topic:
Facts about the swine flu
Self-treatment flu & colds
Swine Flu: New Flu or New Influenza
WHO: Have fears of swine flu been fueled??

Photo credits: Image: Ernst Rose / Pixelio.