The publicity and resulting panic surrounding the WHO’s announcement of phase five and six alerts — especially in the absence (until December) of a widely available vaccine – also brought out fraudsters peddling all sorts of ineffective and possibly dangerous protective gear and nostrums: Gloves, masks, dietary supplements, shampoo, a nasal sanitizer and a spray that supposedly coats the hands with a layer of anti-microbial “ionic silver.”
For all these reasons, the declaration of a pandemic must not be a prediction but rather a kind of real-time snapshot.
The WHO’s performance has been widely criticized: The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, for example, said on January 12 that it plans to debate “false pandemics, a threat to health” later this month. And yet WHO officials continue to defend their actions. In a January 14 conference call with reporters, Keiji Fukuda, the special adviser to the WHO’s director-general for pandemic flu, argued that the organization did not overplay the dangers but “prepared for the worst and hoped for the best.”
The WHO’s dubious decisions demonstrate that its officials are either too rigid or incompetent (or both) to make necessary adjustments to the pandemic warning system — which is what we have come to expect from an organization that is scientifically challenged, self-important, and unaccountable. It may be able to perform and report worldwide surveillance — that is, count numbers of cases and fatalities — but its policy role should be drastically reduced.
Henry I. Miller, a physician, molecular biologist and former flu researcher, is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He was a US government official from 1977 to 1994.
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