Posts Tagged ‘Council of Europe’

Alarmist WHO for sure .. but why and for whom?

June 29, 2010

Handling of the H1N1 pandemic

The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) today endorsed the conclusions of its Health Committee regarding the Swine flu pandemic and the actions of the WHO.

According to the Assembly, the handling of the pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), EU health agencies and national governments led to a “waste of large sums of public money, and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public”. The report finds that there was “overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly overrated by WHO”, resulting in a distortion of public health priorities.

The WHO has been “highly defensive”, the adopted text underlines, and unwilling to accept that a change in the definition of a pandemic was made, or to revise its prognosis of the Swine Flu outbreak. The WHO and European health institutions were not willing to publish the names and declarations of interest of the members of the WHO Emergency Committee and relevant European advisory bodies directly involved in recommendations concerning the pandemic.

The obvious beneficiaries are the pharmaceutical manufacturers of vaccines and Tamiflu and their supporters.

But is anybody at the WHO accountable to anybody?