Keep Health Up

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is to hold an emergency debate and inquiry this month into the “influence” exerted by drugmakers on the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) global H1N1 flu campaign. The resolution to launch the emergency inquiry was approved by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and passed through the health committee unanimously. It states in part that “in order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies, and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.”

“The ‘birds-flu’-campaign (2005/06) combined with the ‘swine-flu’-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies,” noted the resolution. “The Council of Europe and its member-states should ask for immediate investigations and consequences on their national levels as well as on the international level. The definition of an alarming pandemic must not be under the influence of drug-sellers.”

Dr Wodarg, a doctor and former SPD member of the German Bundestag, says that the “false pandemic” campaign began last May in Mexico City, when a hundred or so “normal” reported influenza cases were declared to be the beginning of a threatening new pandemic, although there was little scientific evidence for this. Nevertheless the WHO, “in cooperation with some big pharmaceutical companies and their scientists, re-defined pandemics,” removing the statement that “an enormous amount of people have contracted the illness or died” from its existing definition and replacing it by stating simply that there has to be a virus, spreading beyond borders and to which people have no immunity.

Wodarg called the “false pandemic” one of the greatest medical scandals of the last century and said that pharmaceutical companies influenced the whole process and needed to be held accountable. They were willing to “inflict bodily harm in their pursuit of profits,” he said. Articles in the European press, starting in Denmark and spreading, have repeatedly called into question the myriad ties between vaccine manufacturers and decision makers in the United Nations’ global health body.