ource: PACE resolution

In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.

The "birds-flu"-campaign (2005/06) combined with the "swine-flu"-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies.

The Council of Europe and its member-states should ask for immediate investigations and consequences on their national levels as well as on the international level.
The definition of an alarming pandemic must not be under the influence of drug-sellers.

When in April 2009 some hundred normal influenza cases in Mexico City were rashly announced to be the beginning of a threatening new pandemic, there was little scientific evidence for this judgement. Nevertheless a large and immediate word-wide agenda setting process started and was eagerly spread by alarmist media and formally legitimized by pandemic-defining WHO, the agency, which is our global epidemiological watchdog and task-force.

Besides this, vaccination programs against influenza are already established in most of the exposed countries as an annual routine. They are regularly taking into account all expected varieties of flu-viruses to bundle their antigen fragments in a well-adjusted polyvalent vaccine.

But around the Mexican outbreak, WHO in cooperation with some big pharmaceutical companies and their scientists re-defined pandemics and lowered the alarm-threshold. Those new standards forced politicians in most states to react immediately and sign marketing commitments for additional and new vaccines against "swine-flu" and spend billions of dollars to catch up with the alarming scenario that Big Pharma, media and WHO were spreading.

From the beginning in April 2009 it was clear, that a newly combined flu-virus was on its way - as many flu-virus-variations have been almost every year before. From the first cases in Mexico it was also evident, that this new subtype was doing less harm to infected humans than others in former years. Nevertheless the "swine-flu-campaign" was increasingly threatening people, filling television programs, newspapers, health-agendas, ambulances and hospitals.

Never before the search for traces of a virus was carried out so broadly and intensively. Besides, many cases of death, that happened to coincide with seropositive H1N1 lab-findings, were simply attributed to "swine-flu" and used to foster fear.

Additionally it has been proven, that at least one third of the population older than 60 had already positive test results because of flu contacts in the second half of the last century. In contrast to this "agenda setting process" it has to be stated, that the annual worldwide spreading ("pandemic") of 2009- influenza was a relief for global health, compared with the suffering, influenza waves used to originate most of the years before.

The Australian flu-season, which has already passed by with the Australian winter, has even given evidence, that the infection with "swine-flu" brings some protection against other, more dangerous virus-types. Nevertheless we have to observe, that a faked "swine-flu"- pandemic is still used for marketing risky vaccines.

The victims among millions of needlessly vaccinated people must be protected by their states and independent scientific clarification should provide evidence and transparency for national and -if necessary- European courts.

Tabled by

Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg (Soc. Germany)

(already signed and supported by a sufficient number of menbers of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe)