Strange events took place in Mexico. In spring last year the whole world was shocked to learn that within the space of several weeks thousands of people had been struck down by a new, mysterious virus that had already claimed 160 lives.

WHO put the world on notice that we were on the threshold of a new global epidemic, and it was therefore imperative to begin work immediately on a vaccine to counter a virus capable of jumping from pigs to humans, as any delay could spell the deaths of millions. Public health experts have been searching for the new "Spanish flu" in every corner of the world for at least a decade - and in April last year they claimed that they had found it in Mexico.      

The pathogen spread incredibly quickly and in days had reached the United States, where within a month over ten thousand people had contracted it and fallen ill, after which the virus spread throughout the world and in eight weeks had appeared in 120 countries.   

MISTAKE no. 1: It can now be proven that the panic led to an overestimate of the mortality rate and number of people taken sick.

The H1N1 phenomenon did not turn into an epidemic. As the number of sick people increased, the fatalities in Mexico "disappeared": the WHO report of 26 April 2009 wrote of 1,455 "suspected" cases of infection and 84 fatalities, while some months later the Mexican ministry of health cited 2,498 cases of sickness and 160 fatalities, yet the verified number of sick people was actually 69.    

In the initial panic WHO and the Mexican authorities overestimated the number of victims and after the results of quickly administered tests came back it transpired that the overwhelming majority of those suspected cases had no connection to the virus. 

At the end of April Vivienne Allan of WHO responsible for health safety issued a statement in Mexico that there had been a misunderstanding and that the number of deaths that had so far been conclusively proven to have been caused by the presence of H1N1 was not 160 but only seven. 

American scientists said of the several hundred deaths that occurred later that the reason the same pathogen in Mexico caused a far higher proportion of fatalities was because privatisation of the state-run health service had meant that poor people were unable to pay for medical treatment and so did not receive medicine in time. However, their words fell on deaf ears since WHO focused its attention on emphasising the vulnerability of mankind, due to a new illness which had transferred from pigs, and a repetition of the Spanish flu, which in 1918 caused the deaths of 50 million people and which had spread all over the globe with alarming speed.

They brushed aside counterarguments by pointing out that after a relatively mild period Spanish flu had also spread rampantly. However, it later became clear that the "rampant" period for swine flu took place in Mexico and everywhere else saw the milder version.

According to a recent report by the Council of Europe, WHO, which is an organisation with the world's biggest epidemiology network maintained by the governments of 193 countries, deceived the whole world and urged its member states to spend millions of dollars - including Hungary - because of a pathogen which caused the mildest influenza of recent years and claimed the deaths of only 18 thousand people worldwide. 

In other words, less people died on the whole planet than the recorded number of deaths caused by a normal influenza in Germany and France.

The scandal was brought out into the open in the Council of Europe by the German socialists and this may be partly explained by the fact that the Germans were especially hard hit since the vaccine administered there, which contained fish oil, had serious side effects and made significant numbers of people ill.

The initiators of the investigation realised as early as January that WHO had committed the biggest blunder of all time and stampeded the world into unnecessarily spending 18 billion American dollars. However, the governments of the world have thus far waited in vain for a mea culpa as WHO continues to maintain that its actions were entirely correct in every respect.

The Council of Europe therefore brought in independent research institutes to ascertain how a public health organisation with the biggest budget in the world could make such a huge mistake.

VIRUS CHRONOLOGY

March - April 2009

News comes out of Mexico that thousands have been taken ill with a mortality rate of one in ten.

The overwhelming majority of the victims are poor and unable to access medical care in time.

May 2009

The virus spreads to North America.

The only victim in weeks is a 22-month old child that had come from Mexico.

June 2009

WHO declares a global epidemic. The virus is now present in 120 countries.

In most cases the virus is only accompanied by mild symptoms.

October 2009

Several states that produce their own vaccine order more vaccine than needed for their populations, thus exercising indirect pressure on other states to follow suit.

The vaccine is sold for two to three times the price of usual vaccine material (This was not the case in Hungary).

November 2009

Panic breaks out in Ukraine and there is talk of hundreds of deaths.

It has still not been established what kind of pathogen caused the illnesses.

January 2010

The Council of Europe launches an investigation which lasts several months and concludes by placing the blame on WHO. 

MISTAKE no 2: the virus was not entirely new as older people had already encountered it.

An important observation was that proportionately far fewer people over 60 in every country in the world demonstrated signs of illness as compared to young people. According to Ulrich Keil, a professor of epidemiology at Munster University, this was the most significant piece of evidence that the H1N1 virus was not entirely new and that older members of the population had already encountered it as a disease and younger generations in the form of vaccination.

The professor attributed this to the virus not having a strong capacity to induce illness as the human system can resist it. Swine flu should therefore not have been declared as a global epidemic because it did not fulfill the most important criteria of a pandemic.

At this point those investigating the case came across another surprise: it transpired that since April last year not only most of the Mexican dead noted at the outset had "disappeared", but also the conditions stipulated for declaring a global epidemic.

MISTAKE no. 3: Watering down the criteria of a global epidemic

In May last year - without the public's awareness - WHO changed some of the main points defining a so-called pandemic plan. Up to then four conditions were required to declare the highest level of a global epidemic: 1. a virus originating in animals that was capable of spreading to humans; 2. be a pathogen thus far unknown to humans, against which the human system was defenseless; 3. a higher number of illnesses and fatalities than in the case of a normal influenza.; 4. occurrences on an epidemic scale in several countries or regions.

In May last year the only criterion kept was the geographical one. This was the only one which swine flu accorded with since the pathogen was not entirely new, humanity was not defenseless against it and the disease was neither more widespread nor any more serious than a normal epidemic. 

If there had not been a "recoding", WHO would never have been able to declare H1N1 a global epidemic, which up to now has claimed a total of half a thousandth percent fatality rate in the world, a fraction of that caused by seasonal epidemics. 

Despite this WHO still maintains that the alarm it raised was justified and offers up the explanation that the mortality rates among children were three times the average rate. However, it can now be observed that by the time the effect of the vaccines - developed in a rush - had kicked in, the epidemic would have ended naturally in most countries.    

The seriousness of the effects of the virus was therefore primarily determined by the ability of health services to react in time to the fact that life-threatening conditions were more frequently created by H1N1 among pregnant women and healthy young people than on average. In Hungary, for example, seven hundred people were being treated in hospitals at the beginning of December of whom a total of three hundred had to be given artificial respiration.  

WHO declared a global epidemic even though in spring last year the countries most affected by it - including the United Kingdom - requested that it refrain from doing this because the mild symptoms did not justify such action. They not only wished to hold back the organisation from this course in order to avoid panic, but also because a declaration of an epidemic would incur enormous financial costs for most of the EU member states.

At this point the role of the panic created by the 2006 bird flu - also proven to be a false alarm - also came to light: then, on the advice of WHO, many states signed contracts with vaccine manufacturers, many points of which came into effect in the case of a pandemic being declared.

For example, the manufacturers developed an experimental vaccine and in exchange nations committed themselves to ordering several tens of millions of vaccines in the event of a global epidemic being declared by WHO.

The British Medical Journal, one of the world's most influential medical publications, launched an investigation and established why all of this was in WHO's interests.

MISTAKE no. 4: the independence of the experts

It has transpired that many of the experts involved in the plan elaborated for a pandemic during the bird flu crisis (which included precise specifications that member countries were to do at various levels of the outbreak) had ties with the vaccine manufacturers and with Roche, a company that produces anti-viral medicine.

At the time WHO recommended that its member states purchase anti-viral medicines from this company. Hungary, for example, purchased sufficient quantities of the world famous Tamiflu for one million people.

Before returning to the issue of incompatibility between WHO's experts and the epidemic industry it would be worthwhile raising the question of whether Hungary made a mistake at the time by following WHO's recommendation?

What's more, the European preparations for an epidemic were directed by Zsuzsanna Jakab, a Hungarian, who until February was the director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and since then has been the European regional director for WHO.

This means that Miklós Szócska, the state secretary for health, who has ordered an inquiry, is now faced with the dilemma of whether or not to condemn the previous leadership for using WHO for what it was established for, i.e. to manage transborder health risks. The same problem is now being analyzed by the British and the French as only one country, Poland, realised that they were being led by the nose.

The investigation to be closed in September might possibly come to the conclusion that the Hungarian government bodies had acted with dilettantism. We need merely recall the paradoxical situation whereby millions of vaccines were stored, news broke about the shortage of the same vaccines, and of  people being sent back and forth between pharmacies and doctors to be administered the jab.

While over a million "free vaccines" lay unused in storage, almost 600 thousand people had to pay for their inoculations.  Moreover, the state had added a 40 percent surplus charge to the price of the vaccines.

The decision to declare a global epidemic was made by a secret WHO committee of 16 members, some of the identities of which the experts for a British medical journal were able to uncover. They also discovered which congresses held by vaccine and anti-viral manufacturers the committee members travelled to and how many thousands of dollars such committee members received from the manufacturers for other work. 

This type of conflict of interest can also be observed in the Hungarian preparations for the epidemic. Omninvest, a Hungarian vaccine manufacturer, acquired the "receipt" of the vaccine under fairly suspicious circumstances.

Hungary has been at the forefront of anti-influenza immunisation since the 1950s.  Gyula Takátsy developed a Hungarian vaccine at this time and his name is closely linked to the development of mass and rapid production technologies. The state produced this vaccine material right up until the mid-nineties after which the task was taken over by the mysterious company Omninvest. 

However, the famous Hungarian Takátsy formula was not patented and Omninvest signed a contract with one of Takátsy's student, István Jankovics. This led to Omninvest producing the vaccine by further developing the old formula.  However, since then Jankovics has been recontracted as a public servant, in the position of department head.

We were able to discover other ties between the private company and the public sector: Medyag Ltd, which belongs to the Omninvest Group, constructed the laboratory for the institute of epidemiology.

The strangest thing about the whole affair is that the epidemic disappeared from one day to the next as if it had never even existed. It was taken off the agenda despite the fact that scientific analysis should have been carried out for example on what the reason was for the unusually high death rate in Hungary as compared to international levels: of the 2,160 patients verified to have contracted swine flu there were 134 deaths, i.e. a rate of more than six percent.
   

People who opposed WHO

Ewa Kopacz, the Polish minister for health, had her own experts investigate the Mexican situation and concluded that they had exaggerated the problem there because of the initial panic. Poland did not purchase vaccination material because they found it suspicious that the vaccine producers would have passed on all the responsibility for side effects to the purchasing states.
 

WHAT HAPPENED?

Italy - With a population of sixty million Italy ordered 24 million vaccines, but only administered one million of them. It sold two million of these to other countries and one million of them passed their expiry date and so were destroyed, while half a million were stored away to be used in the event of a second wave of the epidemic. Over twenty million vaccines were not received by the Italians, for which they have to pay damages to the manufacturer.

The United States - With a population of 300 million America produced two hundred million vaccines and threw away 43 percent of them. According to a spokesperson for the department of health the country was rather willing to lose several hundred million dollars than face an epidemic without being prepared. As one of the biggest vaccine exporting countries in the world America scarcely lost out in the affair.

Hungary - It is expected that over a million vaccines will be wasted. The government originally ordered six million vaccines but the four million vaccines delivered in the first stage did not run out as only 2.7 million people were inoculated. The expiry date of the vaccines was extended.

France - With its population of 65 million France ordered 95 million vaccines, but in the end only received over 50 million and by March 5.7 million people had been inoculated. France is one of Europe's largest vaccine manufacturers and thus its surplus order might well have served marketing purposes. This will also be investigated by the French senate, which will complete its report in August.