[Editor’s Note: We will occasionally including opinion pieces from major media sources relevant of our focus on vaccines ethic and policy]

Pandemic lessons
Financial Times
Published: July 2 2010 22:26

As last year’s fear of a flu pandemic fades, the search for culprits is intensifying. Several post-mortems are under way, but the feverish search for scapegoats for the many billions of dollars spent by governments in preparations is misguided.

The UK’s evaluation, chaired by Dame Deirdre Hine and published last Thursday, offers a balanced judgment. It argues that the British response – which cost more than £1.2bn – was largely “proportionate and effective”.

Given the shortages of supply, the lengthy period required to make and test flu vaccines, and the uncertainties around the dangers of the virus at the time, ministers were understandably tempted to risk over-spending for a mild virus rather than under-spending and causing unnecessary deaths.

That is a better assessment than a recent hysterical report from the Council of Europe, which – relying on hindsight – claims a conspiracy of drug companies and health agencies exaggerated the threat of the pandemic. Its unsubstantiated critique risks undermining health agencies far more than they weakened themselves by what it claims amounted to “crying wolf.”

Seasonal flu kills hundreds of thousands of people each year. The current pandemic has claimed many more lives than the officially confirmed toll, including a disproportionate number of children and adults of working age.

The virus is still circulating and will return to the northern hemisphere this winter to cause more illness and death. It may yet mutate into a more serious form. Investments already made will help mitigate the effect.

Yet there are lessons to be drawn from the international response of the past few months. The World Health Organisation should introduce more subtlety to its flu pandemic assessment, adding a measure of severity to its simple definition of a new and fast-spreading virus.

Individual countries, including the UK, should modify their plans to make them more flexible. Many decisions were based on assumptions of a far more lethal virus than the current H1N1, and not adapted accordingly.

Greater efforts should also be made to include a broader range of experts in early risk assessments, such as carrying out more extensive blood tests across the UK. Such studies last year suggested early on that H1N1 was likely to be milder than initially feared.

Internationally, the slow pace of donations of flu vaccines to poorer countries has also highlighted excessive red tape that caused unnecessary infection and death.

A relatively benign virus more than any human intervention lay behind the current pandemic’s light burden. Next time, the threat may be greater and the response will need to be better.