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WHO Panel To Get Pharma Swine Flu Documents
By Pharmalot
May 19, 2010

A panel investigating the World Health Organization’s response to last year’s swine flu outbreak wants to see confidential exchanges between the agency and drugmakers. The 29-member panel wants WHO records and correspondence from before and after the H1N1 strain was declared a pandemic in June, the Associated Press reports.

“We will want to have access to certain confidential documents that may be in place here at WHO or elsewhere,” committee chair Harvey Fineberg, who is also president of the Institute of Medicine in Washington, told reporters in Geneva, adding that documents include “contractual or letters of understanding” between the WHO and drugmakers. Some agreements have been considered confidential, but so far all requests have been met. The panel’s final report should be finished next year.

On the defensive for her handling of the outbreak, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan convened the panel last month and urged its members to conduct a “credible and independent review” that she promised would be transparent, the AP notes. Recently, members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe planned an inquiry into industry influence (look here). The WHO denied allegations that drugmakers were given privileged access to national decision-makers (see this).

Governments around the world spent millions of dollars buying drugs and vaccines in anticipation of a serious outbreak that never happened. Among the companies that benefited was Roche Group, which saw Tamiflu sales jump by $1.74 billion last year. GlaxoSmithKline sold both vaccines and its antiviral Relenza, while Sanofi-Aventis and Baxter International made vaccines.

WHO has confirmed 18,036 deaths from the H1N1 strain over the past year — far fewer than would have died from seasonal flu during the same period. Chan said this week at a meeting of WHO’s 193 member states that the world had been “just plain lucky” that swine flu wasn’t deadlier.