Influenza A: They Organized a Psychosis

international | miscellaneous | other press Wednesday January 13, 2010 16:32 by Eugene Mc Cartan - Communist Party of Ireland cpoi at eircom dot net

Influenza A: They Organized a Psychosis
Bruno Odent, L'Humanité
Wednesday 06 January 2010

Exposé: the president of the Council of Europe's Health Commission, German Wolfgang Wodarg, accuses pharmaceutical lobbies and governments. He has obtained the launch of an investigation by the official body he heads on the role played by laboratories in the campaign of panic around the virus. A no-holds-barred interview.

Former member of the German Socialist Party, Wolfgang Wodarg is a physician and epidemiologist. He garnered the Council of Europe's Health Commission members' unanimous consent for a commission of inquiry into the role of pharmaceutical firms in the management of H1N1 flu by the WHO and by governments ...

Bruno Odet for L'Humanité: What attracted your suspicions about laboratories' undue influence on the decisions taken with respect to influenza A?

Wolfgang Wodarg: We are faced with a failure of the great national institutions charged with alerting us to the risks and responding to them should a pandemic arise. In April, when the first alarm came from Mexico, I was very surprised by the figures the World Health Organization (WHO) was advancing to justify the proclamation of a pandemic. I had suspicions immediately: the figures were quite weak and the level of alarm very elevated. There weren't even a thousand sick people before there was already talk of the pandemic of the century. And the extreme alert decreed was based on the fact that the virus was new. But the characteristic of flu-type illnesses is to develop very fast with viruses that take on new forms each time by moving in on new hosts - animals, people etc. There's nothing new in that. A new "flu" virus of that kind appears every year. In reality, nothing justified sounding the alarm at that level. That was only possible because the WHO changed its definition of pandemic at the beginning of May. Before that date, it was not only necessary that the illness break out in several countries at once, but also that it have very serious consequences, with a number of mortalities in excess of the usual averages. That aspect was erased from the new definition, while the only criterion retained was that of the rate of the illness's diffusion. And it was alleged that the virus was dangerous because populations had not been able to develop immune defenses against it. Which was false for this virus, since we had been able to observe that people over 60 already had antibodies, which is to say that they had already been in contact with analogous viruses. That's why there were practically no people over 60 who developed the illness. Yet, they were the people it was recommended to have be rapidly vaccinated.

Full text at link.

Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher