Pen Meets Paper August 10, 2009

Opinion by Helge Nome
The Swine Flu season is rapidly approaching, or so we are being told. In Canada, some 4000 people die every year from various complications involving influenza. And so far only a handful of deaths can be linked to the current strain of the H1N1 virus. So what is all the fuss? There are a thousand other killers out there, working for the "grim reaper".
In 1976 there was an outbreak of swine flu in the US that caused public health officials there to panic and recommend the immunization of the whole population. The program turned into a public relations disaster when it was found that the vaccine killed more people than the flu.
Remember the "millenium bug". Everything was supposed to fall apart at the stroke of midnight, December 31, 1999 because of a presumed crash of all kinds of computers whose dates had not been progammed to go beyond 1999?
Unbelievable as it now seems, officials of all stripes, from police, ambulance, fire and municipal services, just to name a few, bought into the hysteria and made preparations for the doomsday event that never happened.
I listen to my home town radio station in Norway on a regular basis and happened to overhear a debate on the soundness of the national government's decision to buy enough vaccine doses against the H1N1 virus to vaccinate all Norwegians twice: 9 million doses in all. A professor of medical ethics at the University of Oslo, Jan Helge Bakken held that the several hundred million Norwegian Kroner could be much better spent in other areas of health care. And debate on the subject is currently escalating.
Our government in Canada has committed us to buying 60 million doses of the stuff at a cost of some $400 million to the taxpayer. This is a fear based transaction, just like the Norwegian one, based on recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO).
My question is this: Just what are the connections between the people working for the WHO and Big Pharma that literally stands to make a killing out of this whole deal?