Guess WHO just got an H1N1 flu shot?
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Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General, during a visit to Turkey. Photo: Turkey Health Ministry
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Margaret Chan, that's who.
Her spokeswoman confirmed that Chan was vaccinated on December 30, a day after she admitted at a press conference that she had not got around to getting a vaccine.
After its appearance in April 2009, WHO declared H1N1 influenza a Phase 6 global pandemic the following June. The announcement sent governments scrambling to award billions in development contracts to pharmaceutical companies, caused widespread panic and created tension between affluent countries and low-income countries over access to a vaccine. Today, most of the more affluent countries, including Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United States have surplus H1N1 vaccine stock.
According to the WHO's lab-confirmed cases, the H1N1 virus has killed 12,799 people worldwide as of Fri. Jan. 8. That’s a much lower number than the one Chan quoted on June 11 when she made the pandemic announcement. At that time Chan said: “The virus is contagious, spreading easily from one person to another, and from one country to another. As of today, nearly 30,000 confirmed cases have been reported in 74 countries.”
In comparison, seasonal flu kills between 250,000 and 300,000 people around the world each year, according to WHO data.
Chan said in December that it will take six to 12 more months for the pandemic to run its course.
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Which they did.
Are they playing with semantics here? What’s the difference between “confirmed” and “lab-confirmed?”
We no longer have necessary firewalls between policymakers and private interests. If I'm wrong and many of the reports about "swine flu" are not fear-mongering, I am sorry. But somebody should at least be asking, even if it's uncomfortable to think about.
This does not make me anti-vaccine. I am very skeptical, though, about the drama surrounding the H1N1 (which Michael Cosgrove described in his essay "H1N1 vaccines available at rock bottom prices in Europe" last week on F&S) and when you look at the money thrown at this unknown quantity compared to other diseases which are known quantities and curable.
The CDC said a couple months ago that there were at least a million cases of H1N1 in the U.S., but they stopped taking samples from states so they could be tested and confirmed in the lab long before that. When I pointed out that it was "irresponsible" to release those figures to the media, people jumped all over me. http://tinyurl.com/ybkrsno Hmmm. Seems like common sense to point out the conflicting info, IMO.
The big H1N1 story here in France right now is research which indicates that millions of people may have contracted the virus but mistaken it for a cold,
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