U.N. agency is accused of helping Purdue Pharma spread opioid epidemic around the world - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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NBC News


U.N. agency is accused of helping Purdue Pharma spread opioid epidemic around the world

Lawmakers say the World Health Organization is helping Purdue wage a "propaganda campaign" about opioids.

May 22, 2019


Two members of Congress accused the World Health Organization on Wednesday of helping Purdue Pharma use the same “propaganda campaign” that fueled the opioid epidemic in the United States to expand drug sales internationally.

In a 38-page report titled “Corrupting Influence, Purdue & the Who,” Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., and Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., charged that the WHO has published guidelines for opioid use that parrot Purdue’s claims “that dependence occurs in less than 1 percent of patients, despite no scientific evidence supporting this claim.”

“We believe the similarities between their propaganda campaign in the U.S. and the confusion and deception they have spread through international publications are not a coincidence,” the report states. “We are highly troubled that after igniting the opioid epidemic that cost the United States 50,000 lives in 2017 alone and tens of billions of dollars annually, Purdue is deliberately using the same playbook on an international scale.”

Clark and Rogers called on the WHO to “no longer allow the same companies and the same people who recklessly chose profits over human lives in the United States to inflict the opioid crisis on the rest of the world.”

WHO is an agency of the United Nations that is concerned with international public health and is based in Switzerland.

"We have received the most recent letter from Congress and are reviewing it point by point," WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier wrote in an email after NBC News reached out for a response.

Purdue Pharma spokesman Bob Josephson responded in a statement when NBC News reached out for comment.

“Purdue strongly denies the claims in today’s congressional report, which seeks to vilify the company through baseless allegations,” the statement reads. “Purdue Pharma LP is solely based in the United States with no international operations. The company has never violated any applicable rules or guidelines and no formal complaint or enforcement activity has resulted from Purdue’s financial support or relationship with any third party.”

The report from Clark and Rogers appeared a year after they wrote to Margaret Chan, the WHO’s former director general, and urged her to keep an eye on Purdue Pharma, whose best known product is the powerful painkiller OxyContin, and its network of foreign affiliates, Mundipharma.

"The greed and recklessness of one company and its partners helped spark a public health crisis in the United States," they wrote.

In particular, Clark and Rogers warned that Mundipharma was engaging in “deceptive and dangerous practices.”

Purdue, in a statement, said it is an "industry leader in the development of abuse-deterrent technology."

Mundipharma said in a statement that the company continues "to take active preventative measures."

But Clark and Rogers say they never got a response from the WHO.

“When the WHO failed to respond to the letter, we began to question why they would remain silent about such a significant and devastating public health epidemic,” they wrote in the report. “The answers we found are deeply disturbing.”

Lindmeier, however, insisted their records indicate Chan replied to the lawmakers on May 17, 2017.

In their report, the lawmakers said they discovered that the WHO published a document in 2011 called “Ensuring Balance in National Policies on Controlled Substances, Guidance for Availability and Accessibility of Controlled Medicines” that repeats Purdue’s bogus claim that less than 1 percent of patients get hooked on opioids.

“It states: ‘Opioid analgesics, if prescribed in accordance with established dosage requirements, are known to be safe and there is no need to fear accidental death of dependence
,’” the report states.

Then in 2012, the WHO published a second document called “Pharmacological Treatment of Persisting Pain in Children with Medical Illnesses.”

“This guideline uses the marketing term coined by the opioid industry and utilized often by Purdue: ‘opiophobia,'” the report states. “Opiophobia is how the opioid industry defines a physician’s ‘unreasonable fear’ of prescribing opioids.”

The WHO guideline claimed that there is no maximum dosage of opioids like OxyContin for children despite the fact that U.S. public health agencies have found that “fatal overdoses skyrocket in adult patients who are prescribed above 90 morphine milligram equivalents (MME) per day.”


“The web of influence we uncovered paints a picture of a public health organization that has been manipulated by the opioid industry,” Clark said on her website. “The WHO appears to be lending the opioid industry its voice and credibility, and as a result, a trusted public health organization is trafficking dangerous misinformation that could lead to a global opioid epidemic.”

“The WHO must take action now to right the ship and protect patients around the world, especially children, from the dangers associated with chronic opioid use,” Rogers said in a statement on his website.

Purdue Pharma faces some 1,600 lawsuits that accuse it of promoting OxyContin while downplaying the drug's addictive properties.

In March, it settled with the Oklahoma attorney general for $270 million about two months before the scheduled start of a televised trial in the opioid-ravaged state.

Last year, Massachusetts named eight members of the Sackler family, the principal owners of the company, in a complaint that accused Purdue of spinning a "web of illegal deceit" to boost profits.

Purdue, which has repeatedly denied the allegations, has generated sales of more than $35 billion since OxyContin made its debut in 1995, according to Forbes.


https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/un ... d-n1008956

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WHO retracts opioid guidelines after accepting that industry had an influence

January 10, 2020

The World Health Organization has formally retracted its two main guidelines on the use of opioids for pain control, after its own review lent credence to outside complaints that the drafting process had been unduly influenced by opioid manufacturers, notably Purdue Pharma’s international subsidiary Mundipharma.

The retraction notice was published in the January issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m105.full



The full report from the Congressional Caucus on Prescription Drug Abuse:
http://katherineclark.house.gov/index.c ... 4E7C599D10
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Why The WHO Faked A Pandemic

The World Health Organization has suddenly gone from crying "The sky is falling!" like a cackling Chicken Little to squealing like a stuck pig. The reason: charges that the agency deliberately fomented swine flu hysteria. "The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is wrong and irresponsible," the agency claims on its Web site. A WHO spokesman declined to specify who or what gave this "description," but the primary accuser is hard to ignore.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), a human rights watchdog, is publicly investigating the WHO's motives in declaring a pandemic. Indeed, the chairman of its influential health committee, epidemiologist Wolfgang Wodarg, has declared that the "false pandemic" is "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century."

Even within the agency, the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Epidemiology in Munster, Germany, Dr. Ulrich Kiel, has essentially labeled the pandemic a hoax. "We are witnessing a gigantic misallocation of resources [$18 billion so far] in terms of public health," he said.

They're right. This wasn't merely overcautiousness or simple misjudgment. The pandemic declaration and all the Klaxon-ringing since reflect sheer dishonesty motivated not by medical concerns but political ones.

Unquestionably, swine flu has proved to be vastly milder than ordinary seasonal flu. It kills at a third to a tenth the rate, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. Data from other countries like France and Japan indicate it's far tamer than that.

Indeed, judging by what we've seen in New Zealand and Australia (where the epidemics have ended), and by what we're seeing elsewhere in the world, we'll have considerably fewer flu deaths this season than normal. That's because swine flu muscles aside seasonal flu, acting as a sort of inoculation against the far deadlier strain.

Did the WHO have any indicators of this mildness when it declared the pandemic in June?

Absolutely, as I wrote at the time. We were then fully 11 weeks into the outbreak and swine flu had only killed 144 people worldwide--the same number who die of seasonal flu worldwide every few hours. (An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 per year by the WHO's own numbers.) The mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people.

But how could the organization declare a pandemic when its own official definition required "simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness." Severity--that is, the number of deaths--is crucial, because every year flu causes "a global spread of disease."

Easy. In May, in what it admitted was a direct response to the outbreak of swine flu the month before, WHO promulgated a new definition matched to swine flu that simply eliminated severity as a factor. You could now have a pandemic with zero deaths.

Under fire, the organization is boldly lying about the change, to which anybody with an Internet connection can attest. In a mid-January virtual conference WHO swine flu chief Keiji Fukuda stated: "Did WHO change its definition of a pandemic? The answer is no: WHO did not change its definition." Two weeks later at a PACE conference he insisted: "Having severe deaths has never been part of the WHO definition."

They did it; but why?

In part, it was CYA for the WHO. The agency was losing credibility over the refusal of avian flu H5N1 to go pandemic and kill as many as 150 million people worldwide, as its "flu czar" had predicted in 2005.

Around the world nations heeded the warnings and spent vast sums developing vaccines and making other preparations. So when swine flu conveniently trotted in, the WHO essentially crossed out "avian," inserted "swine," and WHO Director-General Margaret Chan arrogantly boasted, "The world can now reap the benefits of investments over the last five years in pandemic preparedness."

But there's more than bureaucratic self-interest at work here. Bizarrely enough, the WHO has also exploited its phony pandemic to push a hard left political agenda.

In a September speech WHO Director-General Chan said "ministers of health" should take advantage of the "devastating impact" swine flu will have on poorer nations to get out the message that "changes in the functioning of the global economy" are needed to "distribute wealth on the basis of" values "like community, solidarity, equity and social justice." She further declared it should be used as a weapon against "international policies and systems that govern financial markets, economies, commerce, trade and foreign affairs."

Chan's dream now lies in tatters. All the WHO has done, says PACE's Wodart, is to destroy "much of the credibility that they should have, which is invaluable to us if there's a future scare that might turn out to be a killer on a large scale."

https://www.forbes.com/2010/02/05/world ... a043c048e8

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Opioid analgesics, if prescribed in accordance with established dosage requirements, are known to be safe and there is no need to fear accidental death of dependence,’


Tell that to Jordan Peterson :|
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It’s deja-vu all over again with the W.H.O. declaring “pandemics” that result in gold rushes for pharmaceutical companies who swoop in with vaccines to save the day. But are they actually saving anyone? Or do serious adverse events such as the very real narcolepsy epidemic that we saw in the swine flu “pandemic” of 2009—which many researchers tie to GSK’s Pandemrix—counter any perceived benefits of these rushed vaccines? The Jab breaks down what happened in 2009 and why it’s critical that we understand this today.
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