SOURCE:
Pandemic Podcast

Dig a little and you’ll quickly find that the Covid-19 global response bears more than a few similarities to what happened after the World Health Organisation declared H1N1 swine flu a pandemic in June 2009.

The WHO’s definition of ‘pandemic’ had been changed just a month earlier — nobody had to die now as long as infections were widespread — and much of the wildly inaccurate modelling was provided by Professor Neil Ferguson and his Imperial College colleagues.

At the centre of the H1N1 storm was today’s guest, Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, a physician, pulmonary specialist, epidemiologist and former German MP. As then chair of the health committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, he forced a debate early in 2010 on Pharma’s influence on the global swine flu campaign and the attendant rush to develop vaccines.

One of those vaccines was GSK’s Pandemrix which caused the deaths of at least 1,300 children across Europe and left many thousands more with lifelong neurological injuries, including narcolepsy. It had not been tested on children.

Fast forward to spring 2020, and the world was plunged into lockdown — in significant measure on the back of Professor Ferguson’s modelling — and the race to find a vaccine for Covid-19 was quickly under way.