PharmaTimes | Industry News | World News | Council of Europe Assembly slams WHO, pharma over pandemic
The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly has backed a highly-critical report on the handling of the H1N1flu pandemic, and called on the pharmaceutical industry to revise its rules on how it cooperates with the public sector.
In a debate which adopted the Assembly Health Committee’s report on the pandemic, published on June 4, the parliamentarians condemned the “waste of large sums of public money and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public” which had resulted from the way the pandemic had been handled by the World Health Organization (WHO), European Union (EU) health agencies and national governments. There was “overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly overrated by WHO,” resulting in a distortion of public health priorities, they added.
They supported the findings of the report – produced by Health Committee rapporteur and UK Labour Member of Parliament Paul Flynn – that there were “grave shortcomings” in the transparency of decision-making about the outbreak, generating concerns about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on decisions taken. Plummeting confidence in such advice could prove “disastrous” in the case of a severe future pandemic, they warned.
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