The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a 47 nation body encompassing democratically elected members of parliament, has begun hearings to investigate whether the H1N1 swine flu pandemic was falsified or exaggerated in an attempt to profit from vaccine sales.

A PACE resolution, passed last month, gave context to the hearings which began yesterday in Strasbourg.

“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 “bird-flu”-campaign (2005/06) combined with the “swine-flu”-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies.”

Heading the hearings will be chairman of the Health Committee of PACE, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a former German lawmaker, a medical doctor and epidemiologist. Wodarg has referred to the swine flu pandemic as “one of the greatest medical scandals of the century.”

Wodarg charges that the WHO altered the definition of a pandemic from an outbreak in several continents at once with an above-average death rate, to one where the spread of the disease is constant.

The Parliamentary inquiry will determine if a “falsified pandemic” was declared by WHO in June 2009 on the advice of medical advisors, many of whom have close financial ties to the very pharmaceutical giants – GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Novartis, – that produced the H1N1 vaccines.