"Many countries - including the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Finland, Canada, the Netherlands and Switzerland - had already placed large orders for H1N1 vaccine weeks before the WHO declared H1N1 a pandemic on June 11, 2009," the news service notes. "The United States, for example, ordered $649 million of pandemic H1N1 influenza vaccine antigen and $283 million of adjuvant on May 22, 2009. So the Emergency Committee could not have influenced these in any way." According to Nature News/Scientific American, the authors of the BMJ piece agreed the timeline they presented in the article was off.

The article includes comments by several influenza experts who voice support for the WHO's handling of the H1N1 pandemic (Butler, 6/8).

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