Swine flu overblown by pharmaceutical companies

The World Health Organization has formally drawn the curtain on its pandemic of swine flu. This comes after 18 months which saw out-of-Mexico scare stories, a Level Six global pandemic alert for the first time in 4 decades  and the application of some 300 million doses of vaccine against the dreaded new virus. Hundreds more million doses went into storage worldwide, netting hundreds of millions of dollars for big-name makers of them.      

 But strangely, the regular seasonal flu has killed many, many more people in the past 18 months than the spooky A/H5N1. And when it also came to light earlier this year that the WHO had been advised on swine flu by the same people who sat on company boards in the pharmaceutical industry, the Council of Europe mounted a probe and quickly came to the conclusion that the threat of the virus had been blown out of proportion in the interests of medical drug makers.   

This opinion is shared by the Russian virologist Dr Igor Nikanorov:  The whole story boils down to a brazen bid to grab cash. The drug companies behind the design were after big money regardless of ethics. They sent millions of people scurrying for useless medicines instantly turned money-spinners.

 Swine flu has quietly fizzled out. This raises a suspicion that its immediate predecessor on the medical scare circuit, avian flu, too, was no more than a masterfully crafted spooky story.