Via The New York Times, an op-ed by Thomas Abraham, who worked for WHO last spring: There Is No ‘False Pandemic’. Excerpt:
Not for the first time, the World Health Organization is under fire for its handling of the current H1N1 influenza pandemic. Initially, it was criticized for being too slow to alert the world when the disease, often called swine flu, first broke out in Mexico. Now, the organization faces a diametrically opposite charge: that it was influenced by the pharmaceutical industry to create a false pandemic when none existed, so that drug companies could sell more vaccines.
The W.H.O.’s critics are barking up the wrong tree. This is a real influenza pandemic, not an imaginary disease cooked up by public health agencies around the world and the pharmaceutical industry. Though for the vast majority of people the disease has been mild, it has killed small children, pregnant mothers and otherwise healthy teenagers.
This is not an innocuous disease. Take a look at the lungs of those whom it as killed: The virus has turned them into a wasteland of devastated tissue, in a way that the normal flu virus never can.
The world has been fortunate that this virus has not mutated to cause more severe illness in larger numbers of people. This could still happen.
In China, in less than a month’s time, one of the world’s great annual movements of people will take place as millions travel to their home towns and villages during the Chinese lunar new year holidays. Travel and the movement of people provides opportunities for the virus to spread to new environments and change to a more lethal form in the process.
The changing flu seasons that see the focus of outbreaks move from the northern to the southern hemisphere, and then back again to the northern hemisphere later in the year, also bring risks of the virus changing to a more severe form.
The non-debate over whether there is a new type of flu sweeping the world has detracted from a real issue: The world’s poorest countries have yet to receive the vaccine they were promised, while many of the world’s rich countries are wondering what to do with vaccine supplies their citizens do not want.
Ninety percent of the world’s influenza vaccine production is concentrated in Europe and North America. With production well short of demand, governments in these countries had contracts in place to buy the bulk of the first year’s production. Most poor and middle income countries (with the exception of countries like China, which has built up its vaccine production capacity) would have had to wait for at least a year for their first supplies.
If this pandemic had rapidly gained lethality and killed several millions of people, the imbalance in the supply of vaccine would have caused a major rift in society between those who had access to vaccines and those who did not.
While those who lived in the world’s rich countries would have been largely protected, the majority of the world’s population would have borne the brunt of the pandemic, exposing the fault lines that divide the haves from the have nots in today’s globalized world.
