The media is having a field day arguing that experts affiliated to the World Health Organisation (WHO) also had links with pharmaceutical majors and so they benefited from creating a scare about swine flu.
As a parent, I know the fear is true since I ran to get my child tested for swine flu when he had the beginnings of a viral fever. Obviously some pharmaceutical companies benefited from this.
But a company benefiting is quite different from it being done deliberately. The media needs to ponder over the number of deaths and that of those affected by the virus. Once it sees how large these numbers are, it will realise the WHO officials probably had no other option but to raise the alarm.
The WHO alarm is what ensured each country took the right kind of precautions and stocked up on the relevant medicine. It was this kind of WHO advisory that ensured, in the case of bird flu, that countries started culling infected birds and prevented the flu from spreading.
Don’t just go around maligning officials who do not have the wherewithal to defend themselves.
Shreekant Sinha, Noida