Swine Flu Update

TPS friend Pavel Yakovlev sends along this bit concerning the swine flu; my thoughts from April are here, I'm happy to admit that it became a bit more of an issue than I projected if the other side would admit that it became nowhere near the issue they projected it to be. Also, for what it's worth, the elderly didn't end up in the high risk groups due to what the medical folk say was a similar virus a few decades ago that provided enough resistance to the current H1N1 virus.

Note the regulatory control aspects of the story-- government secures contracts with pharmaceutical companies that are activated with the World Health Organization's declaration of "pandemic," and the pharmaceutical companies' role in influencing the determination of which medical scenarios are elevated to "pandemic" status. The appropriate quotes:

"The aim is that none of the pharmaceutical companies under any circumstances must be allowed to make their influence felt on pandemic emergencies,” he says and adds that rules for patenting also will be checked...

...

"The governments have sealed contracts with vaccine producers where they secure orders in advance and take upon themselves almost all the responsibility. In this way the producers of vaccines are sure of enormous gains without having any financial risks. So they just wait, until WHO says "pandemic” and activate the contracts."

For that reason, Wolfgang Wodarg also finds it suspicious that WHO changed it’s definition of a pandemic on it’s homepage at the end of May this year:

"From June 2009 it is no longer necessary, that "an enormous amount of people have contracted the illness or died” - there simply have to be a virus, spreading beyond borders, and one that people have no immunity towards,” he says.