With governments around the world getting stuck with unused supplies of swine flu vaccine, it was almost a sure bet that at some point Big Pharma would be attacked for orchestrating a global panic attack in order to sell billions of dollars worth of vaccine.
So it's no great surprise to hear that a group of activists in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe plan to investigate if the vaccine companies pressured the World Health Organization to declare the first pandemic in more than 40 years. Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, chairman the PACE Health Committee, called it "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century."
"In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide," reads the statement. "They have made them squander tight health care resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines."
Most of the world's government health agencies, meanwhile, are continuing to plead with people to get vaccinated. Many people, though, are either ignoring the swine flu threat or avoiding the vaccine due to unsubstantiated fears of side effects.
- here's the story from PharmaTimes