Ranjit Devraj
New Delhi, Jul 12 2010 (IPS) – At a time when the World Health Organisation (WHO) faces charges that it hyped up the swine flu pandemic to benefit pharmaceutical companies, India is sprucing up its indigenous capacity to manufacture vaccines against the H1N1 virus.
The privately-owned Serum Institute of India has launched Nasovac , a nasal spray, following clearance from the Drug Controller of India. The spray follows Vaxiflu-S , a single dose injectable manufactured by the Indian pharmaceutical major Zydus-Cadila, which has been on Indian drug store shelves since Jun. 3.
With a large population (1.2 billion) spread over a vast country, we cannot depend on other countries for vaccines against a pandemic like swine flu, India s health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad told IPS.
Since India recorded its first case of swine flu in May 2009, at least 32,000 people have contracted the virus and 1,540 people have died as a result, according to the union health ministry. Currently the virus is reported to be spreading primarily in the west coast states of Kerala and Maharashtra.
To contain the virus, the Indian government had imported 1.5 million doses of vaccines from Sanofi Pasteur in December 2009. Sanofi Pasteur is one of several vaccine manufacturers which is said to have close links with scientists and consultants on the World Health Organisation (WHO) Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunisation, which advises the world body on vaccine policy.
GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Solvay, Baxter and MedImmune were also among vaccine manufacturers named in Danish news reports as having links with SAGE members in the form of massive research grants and consultancies. The scandal first came to light in December 2009 when Information , a Danish daily newspaper, scooped out documents which allegedly proved that a Finnish member of SAGE had received kickbacks worth 6.3 million euro (7.8 million dollars) in 2009 for a vaccine research programme from a drugs manufacturer.
Dinesh Trivedi, India s junior minister for health, was among the first public figures to demand an inquiry into the alleged nexus between pharmaceutical companies and WHO to declare H1N1 flu a pandemic. Trivedi noted that his ministry had reservations right from the day WHO raised the level of the pandemic alert on Jun. 11, 2009.
Trivedi s concerns were voiced by India s topmost health bureaucrat K. Sujatha Rao at the executive board meeting of the WHO on Jan. 21, where she demanded that the body effectively explain reports appearing in the media that the swine flu was a false pandemic.
The worst indictment came from the Council of Europe which passed a resolution on Jan. 25 saying that in order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.
The definition of an alarming pandemic must not be under the influence of drug-sellers, the Council resolved while asking for investigations at national and international levels on a non-pandemic which was estimated to have cost the world 18 billion dollars.
WHO s top influenza expert, Dr Keiji Fukuda, responded on Jan. 26 by stating that the influenza pandemic policies and responses recommended and taken by the WHO were not improperly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry.
The Jun. 3 edition of the reputed British Medical Journal (BMJ) carried an investigative feature which referred to conflicts of interest concerning WHO scientific advisors on the swine flu pandemic. It alleged that the advisers were doing paid work for pharmaceutical companies.
A separate BMJ editorial said that given the scale of public cost and private profit in declaring a swine flu pandemic, it was important to be assured that key decisions made by WHO were free from commercial influence.
WHO director-general Margaret Chan rejected BMJ s charges in a statement Jun. 8 in which she said that the decision to raise the level of the pandemic alert was based on clearly defined virological and epidemiological criteria.
As a result of the media expose and the Council of Europe s stand, several Western governments scampered to offload vast stockpiles of vaccines acquired as a reaction to WHO s pandemic alert and the fears it spawned about vaccine shortages in developing countries.
Amit Sen Gupta, a doctor attached with the Delhi Science Forum, a major think tank, welcomed the Indian health ministry s move to build indigenous capacity to manufacture vaccines given the pulls and pushes in the international market. Western governments first created an artificial scarcity by buying up available stocks of H1N1 vaccines immediately after the WHO raised the pandemic alert, and now they are trying to dump their unwanted stocks. Developing countries suffer doubly from inequities in access and from market manipulations, he told IPS. Sen Gupta, however, added that rather than supporting private Indian manufacturers, it would be more advisable for the government to revive public-sector vaccine manufacturing to effectively counter exigencies of the type created by WHO s allegedly hyped pandemic alert.
