Last year, anyone suggesting that the World Health Organization had prematurely declared the H1N1 outbreak a “pandemic” was treated like an anti-science neanderthal. Well, now it’s pretty obvious that it was indeed premature, and the British Medical Journal may have discovered why the WHO jumped the gun:
Key scientists advising the World Health Organization on planning for an influenza pandemic had done paid work for pharmaceutical firms that stood to gain from the guidance they were preparing. These conflicts of interest have never been publicly disclosed by WHO.
And the BMJ piece names names: Fred Hayden, of the University of Virginia and the Wellcome Trust; Arnold Monto of the University of Michigan, and Karl Nicholson of the University of Leicester, England. All three of these characters have received money from Roche and other drug companies.
As one might expect from any organization associated with the UN, the representatives of WHO are standing by their decision and calling questions about conflicts of interest “conspiracy theories.” What should make you, as an American, nervous is that our our own HHS also has its head planted firmly in the sand:
The WHO handled the outbreak in a very measured and appropriate manner … Their decisions were driven by the existing and evolving conditions at the time and what the best scientific information was telling us. It’s very easy to look back through a 20-20 lens and essentially be an armchair quarterback.
This was the statement issued by HHS, the agency charged with implementing Obamacare. The first impulse of these people, who fumbled their own H1N1 response, was to protect their fellow apparatchiks. Forget the good of the public and the stupendous waste of resources.
The WHO, by the way, is the organization that has consistently ranked the U.S. health care system far below nations with obviously worse systems. It’s ranking method has been shown to be hopelessly flawed, but that never made any difference to the promoters of government-run health care.
All bureaucrats are cut from the same incompetent, corrupt cloth as the political “leaders” who would have them run our lives.
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