Last June, the WHO, responding to an outbreak of the H1N1 virus, or swine flu, boosted the pandemic alert to the highest level, phase six, meaning that a pandemic was under way — the first time in 41 years that the organization had taken that declared step. But the outbreak appears to have ended less like the rogue wild boar that WHO bureaucrats predicted and more like a roasted pork tenderloin with apples and sage.
In fact, the WHO repeatedly violated detective Sherlock Holmes’ warning: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence.”
And the pandemic alert was doubly strange, given that ordinary seasonal flu sweeps the world annually, is invariably far more lethal than the currently circulating low-virulence H1N1, and certainly meets the WHO’s definition of a pandemic: Infections over a wide geographic area and affecting a large proportion of the population.
Ironically, the appearance of the H1N1 flu during the past nine months might be thought of as a net public health benefit, because it appears to have suppressed, or at least supplanted, the far more virulent and lethal seasonal flu strains. During the second week of January, 3.7 percent of Americans tested positive for the seasonal flu, compared to 11.5 percent during the same week last year. The official death toll worldwide from H1N1 is under 14,000, while seasonal flu kills about 36,000 on average in the US and hundreds of thousands elsewhere.
Most flu and public health experts consider the WHO to have been overly alarmist. The decision last April to raise the pandemic flu threat to the penultimate level, phase five (“Pandemic Imminent”), already raced far ahead of the accumulated data, so the phase six declaration in June revealed the organization’s paradigm to be fundamentally flawed. A warning system based solely on how widely a virus has spread, but that does not consider the nature and severity of the illness it causes, would classify as “pandemics” not only seasonal flu, but also the frequent but largely inconsequential outbreaks of virus-caused colds and gastroenteritis, for example. Furthermore, the WHO has never explained why these obvious examples do not meet their criteria.
False alarms make the “pandemic under way” designation almost meaningless and diminish its usefulness. And that, in turn, has important consequences.
As Jack Fisher, a professor of surgery at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, said: “Keep crying ‘wolf,’ and WHO can expect lower than customary compliance with flu vaccine advisories next fall.”
Worse, imagine what would happen when we encounter a genuinely dangerous new pathogen, such as a strain of H5N1 avian flu, which in its current form has a mortality rate more than 100 times higher than H1N1, and is easily transmissible between humans.
The UN’s false alarms also have had more immediate negative effects. According to Matthew Hingerty, the managing director of Australia’s Tourism Export Council, the country lost thousands of tourists because of the WHO’s pandemic declaration. In Egypt, public health authorities overreacted and ordered the slaughter of all pigs in the country. In addition to the direct economic losses, the numbers of rodents rose to fearsome levels because the pigs were no longer available to consume much of the garbage produced in Cairo.
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.
COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017