In 1988 Halfdan Mahler (WHO director general during 1973- 1988) in the daily Danish newspaper Politiken warned the world against the power the pharmaceutical industry had over WHO: “the industry is taking over WHO”, he said. But nobody believed him, because it was too difficult for the public to understand the complicated power games he talked about. Unfortunately he was right.

Recent scandals, like the Swine Flu scandal in 2009, has shown that WHO unfortunately has succumbed totally to the power of the pharmaceutical industry [1,2,17-59]; we have also gained important insight in how the WHO-system works. Let us take a look at some of the facts that came to public knowledge during this scandal.

On June 11, 2009 the WHO declared that the world faced a horrible and deathly influenza pandemic [17,19,23,27-29,38,41,42,58] with millions of people predicted to die in the worst disaster in modern time. All over the world more than two hundred countries prepared for the pandemic like the plague or the Spanish Flu, which over the next few months could claim the lives of 40 million people or so - as it happened during the Spanish Flu in the cold and bitter years 1918-1919 following World War I.

In June and July 2009 national borders were suddenly closed, thousands of public meeting places, like restaurants, cafes, and libraries in many countries were closed, and millions of travelers were stopped from entering a number of countries in Asia, if they had fever or a common cold [27-29,38,41,42,58].

Many people travelling wasted hours on emergency health controls and physicians, hospitals and Ministries of Health panicked and started to send patients home. Many countries started to buy influenza vaccines or anti-influenza drugs and spend vast amounts of dollars [1,2,17-59]. The pharmaceutical industry had good days indeed.

As the world reacted to the threat by continuing to buy incredible amounts of influenza vaccines and anti-influenza medicine a debate started in the scientific media like the British Medical Journal (BMJ) [15-25] and slowly also in the public media worldwide [1,2,24-59]. Suddenly WHO was accused of “crying wolf” [23] and supporting the pharmaceutical industry [1,2,14-25].

It turned out to be a false alarm and the Swine Flu epidemic in 2009 did not cause the many cases of deaths as first expected [12,13,15- 25]. Slowly it became known that the WHO actually knew this already BEFORE the director-general Margaret Chan declared the pandemic. This can be seen by the fact that WHO changed the definition of a “pandemic” from meaning “millions of deaths” to mean a nondangerous infection that spreads worldwide only one month before the WHO’s declaration of the pandemic [1,2,14-25,28,29].

In 2010 a number of representatives from governments all over the world as well as a number of international organizations i.e. the Council of Europe agreed that WHO had caused an international panic and disaster by declaring the mildest flu ever, the A/H1N1 “Swine flu” influenza, to be a pandemic threatening mankind. The Council of Europe pointed in a dire report to the problem of WHO going private as the true cause of all the trouble [58].

During 2010 the situation continued to develop and turned into a medical scandal of unknown proportions [1,2,17-59]. Ineffective and dangerous medicines worth billions of dollars were sent for destruction. Close and secret links between the WHO and the pharmaceutical industry producing the vaccines was exposed. The Danish newspaper “Information” found that five researchers involving in advising WHO during the scandal had been paid around seven million EURO from the vaccine industry [38].

The vaccines and the anti-influenza medicine were in Cochrane reviews documented to be totally without value and burdening its users with a long list of adverse effects [1,2,14-25,28,29,55]. Soon it was realized that thousands of patients suffered from a wide range of serious adverse effects: local inflammations, local or systemic muscle pain, vasculitis, neuritis (autoimmune nerve-inflammations), encephalitis, narcolepsy, and other chronic pains [19,28,29,43-45,49,51,58]. The media then discovered that the adjuvants used in vaccines had many serious adverse effects that were mentioned to the citizens neither by the companies who sold the vaccines, nor by the governments buying and reselling the vaccines [1,2,17-59].

It also turned out that the contracts the industry had made with the countries included a paragraph that the adverse effects were the buyer’s full responsibility [1,2,17-25,28,29, 30-59]. The scandal came with an after-match: During 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 many countries’ patient-organizations have started court cases against the governments, who had given them the ineffective and dangerous medicine [28,29,44,51].

It also became clear that it was the flu-vaccine-industry that had taken control over WHO and created a fake pandemic and the world wanted an answer to this question: Did WHO fail its responsibility as leader in international health in 2009? [1,2,14-23,28,29,58].