The following was written in 2007, from a chapter in Virus Mania.

The Media: Big Pharma's Megaphone

If one believes the media reports about avian flu, the world will be afflicted by a global epidemic-a so-called pandemic-in the near future, triggered by a mutation of an avian flu virus with the mysterious and ominous-sounding. name H5N1. In the weekly newspaper Die Zeit in late summer 2005, we read with shudders this front page headline: "Death on silent wings-the bird flu is approaching." And, as if the point was to create the title for the sequel to the Hollywood shocker Outbreak, in which actor Dustin Hoffman is on the hunt for a deadly virus: "H5N1 plays Blitzkrieg [lightning war] " ; "impending attack of the killer ducks."^[1]

Der Spiegel quoted David Nabarro, named the UN chief coordinator in the battle against avian flu in September 2005 : "A new flu pandemic can break out any moment-and it can kill up to 150 million people."^[2] Reinhard Kurth, director of Berlin's Robert Koch Institute, didn't want to be outdone by Nabarro and, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he warned that, "an epidemic potentially threatens all six billion people."^[3]

A more detailed inspection of media reporting on the subject shows one report or another that actually downplayed the virus panic. The Canadian news magazine Macleans (the country's equivalent to Time in the USA) printed an article headlined: "Forget SARS, West Nile, Ebola, and Avian Flu [H5N1 ]-The Real Epidemic Is Fear."^[4] Marc Siegel, professor of medicine at New York University and author of the 2005 book False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear, presented his critique of the fear mongering climate in several media simultaneously, including the Ottawa Citizen,^[5] the Canadian capital's most significant daily newspaper, the Los Angeles Times^[6] and USA Today.^[7]

In German-speaking regions, Freitag,^[8] Berliner Republik,^[9] and Journalist^[10] were among the publications, that ventured to be critical; and the Swiss Weltwoche wrote: "Only when the last chicken has laughed itself to death will you see that horror reports are more contagious than BSE, SARS and H5N1 ."^[11]

Sadly, the few levelheaded voices got completely lost in the tidal wave of H5N1 virus-manic reports. Under this apocalyptic cloud, there were few attempts to get to the facts, which should have happened from the beginning. Are the warnings churned out by newspapers, magazines and television stations and sold to a global public as the final conclusions of truth, backed up by scientific proof? Quite evidently not.

The scientists and their lobbyists seem more interested in acting as media celebrities. These mainstream virus experts do their rounds in newspapers and on television, creating a guise of legitimacy. The media repeats exactly what these so called experts want to hear without asking for evidence. We discovered this after getting in touch with various publications asking the following questions :

1. Is an independent study available to you, which proves that the so-called H5N1 virus exists?

2. If there's proof of the virus' existence, is an independent study available to you, which proves that the H5N1 virus has pathogenic effects on animals?

3. Does sound evidence exist that rules out other factors (chemical toxins, foreign proteins, stress, etc.) as causes of the avian disease?

4. Is an independent study available to you, which proves that H5N1 can jump to the human species and can trigger a pandemic with many millions of deaths?

Even opinion leaders like the Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, however, could not name a single study.^[12] Die Zeit merely wrote : "All primary sources [studies] can easily be looked up using [the scientific databanks] DIMDI or Pubmed, and can then be ordered through [the document delivery service] Subito. Experts from the Robert Koch Institute, for example, or the National Research Center for Viral Diseases in Riems [the Friedrich Loeffler-Institute (FLI) ] are open to questions from any journalist. And the relevant CDC and WHO publications are freely accessible."

In response, we told Die Zeit that the research methods they had mentioned were very familiar to us and we were only asking them kindly to name what we had requested : concrete studies. But there was no answer.^[13]

Many people will be bewildered by this information. Can the public really assume that the mainstream media (which pitches itself as a watchdog of political and economic powers-that-be) critically filters the statements of the medical industry and other interest groups-and do not simply function as megaphones, strengthening the industry's advertising messages?

The H5N1 hysteria made it clear that the media hangs on the words and opinions of the establishment, perhaps most especially regarding medical science. This was also shown by the paper "Bitter Pill," which appeared in, arguably, America's most significant media journal, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) in the summer of 2005. It describes in detail with numerous examples, how the medical industry uses the media to play out their modem marketing script: first by depicting scenarios of horror, creating the desire and demand for a remedy (typically in drug form)-and finally, the miracle substances come to the rescue, providing the pharmaceutical companies and their researchers high profits.

Not only do journalists naively trust the leading medical officials. "The news media too often seem more interested in hype and hope than in critically appraising new drugs on behalf of the public," as CJR writer Trudy Lieberman outlines. "[And] the problem has grown dramatically in recent years as direct-to-consumer advertising has increased, delivering ever-higher ad revenues to the nation's media."

In 1980, Big Pharma spent just $2 million in the USA on marketing and advertisements-but by 2004, this sum had swelled to several billions of dollars per year. And "instead of standing apart from the phenomenon and earning the public's trust," writes Lieberman, "the press too often is caught up in the same drug-industry marketing web that also ensnares doctors, academic researchers, even the FDA, leaving the public without a reliable watchdog."^[14]