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
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry gives it a strategic advantage, but that advantage would be threatened as the US seeks to end Taiwan’s monopoly in the industry and as China grows more assertive, analysts said at a security dialogue last week. While the semiconductor industry is Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” its dominance has been seen by some in the US as “a monopoly,” South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University academic Kwon Seok-joon said at an event held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition, Taiwan lacks sufficient energy sources and is vulnerable to natural disasters and geopolitical threats from China, he said.
After reading the article by Hideki Nagayama [English version on same page] published in the Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) on Wednesday, I decided to write this article in hopes of ever so slightly easing my depression. In August, I visited the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, to attend a seminar. While there, I had the chance to look at the museum’s collections. I felt extreme annoyance at seeing that the museum had classified Taiwanese indigenous peoples as part of China’s ethnic minorities. I kept thinking about how I could make this known, but after returning
What value does the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hold in Taiwan? One might say that it is to defend — or at the very least, maintain — truly “blue” qualities. To be truly “blue” — without impurities, rejecting any “red” influence — is to uphold the ideology consistent with that on which the Republic of China (ROC) was established. The KMT would likely not object to this notion. However, if the current generation of KMT political elites do not understand what it means to be “blue” — or even light blue — their knowledge and bravery are far too lacking
Taipei’s population is estimated to drop below 2.5 million by the end of this month — the only city among the nation’s six special municipalities that has more people moving out than moving in this year. A city that is classified as a special municipality can have three deputy mayors if it has a population of more than 2.5 million people, Article 55 of the Local Government Act (地方制度法) states. To counter the capital’s shrinking population, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) held a cross-departmental population policy committee meeting on Wednesday last week to discuss possible solutions. According to Taipei City Government data, Taipei’s