As WDDTY revealed to subscribers of its journal last month, several officials at the World Health Organization were in the pay of leading drug companies when last year’s swine flu scare was declared an epidemic. The moment the WHO increased the threat level to phase 6, or epidemic, multi-billion contracts that drug companies had set up with health agencies around the world were automatically triggered. Today, drug companies that offered anti-virals are counting the pennies. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) recently announced a surge in first-quarter revenues of 17 per cent because of lb698m ($1bn) of sales of its Pandemrix swine-flu shots. The European Parliament and an independent team are separately investigating the WHO’s role so-called epidemic – and especially its connections to the drugs industry. As WDDTY has revealed, several drug companies were sponsoring influential WHO committees that were advising on the spread of the swine flu (H1N1) virus, and several WHO advisors have admitted they were receiving payments from drug firms. (Source: WDDTY. 2010; vol 21, no 3 (June): 7-8; BMJ, 2010; 340: c2912).
