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Posted: 6/4/2010 5:48:42 AM EDT
A joint report into the handling of the H1N1 outbreak has found that some scientists who advised governments to stockpile drugs, had previously been on the payroll of big drug companies.
The report, published in the British Medical Journal, found World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines on the use of medicine to treat the virus were prepared by experts who had received consulting fees from the top two manufacturers of the drugs - Roche and GlaxoSmithKline. The WHO's decision to name the flu a "pandemic" is also coming under scrutiny from European investigators, and stands accused of exaggerating the dangers of the H1N1 outbreak, which emerged in April last year. The British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that WHO guidelines on the use of antiviral drugs were prepared by experts who had received consulting fees from the top two manufacturers of these drugs, Roche and GlaxoSmithKline. In apparent violation of its own rules, the WHO did not publicly disclose these conflicts when the guidelines were drawn up in 2004, according to the report, jointly authored by the London-based non-profit Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The WHO's advice led governments worldwide to stockpile vast quantities of antivirals, and its decision to declare a pandemic in June 2009 triggered the purchase of billion of dollars worth of hastily manufactured vaccines. Much of these stocks have gone unused because the pandemic turned out to be far less lethal than some experts feared, fueling suspicion that Big Pharma exerted undue influence on WHO decisions. The report also reveals that at least one expert on the secret, 16-member "emergency committee" formed last year to advise the WHO on whether and when to declare a pandemic received payment during 2009 from GSK. Announcing that swine flu had become a global pandemic automatically triggered latent contracts for vaccine manufacture with half-a-dozen major pharmaceutical companies, including GSK. The WHO has refused to identify committee members, arguing that they must be shielded from industry pressure. "The WHO's credibility has been badly damaged," BMJ editor Fiona Godlee said in an editorial. To repair that damage, the global health body must reveal the membership and any conflicts of interest of its emergency committee, and develop "stricter rules of engagement with industry that keep commercial influence away from its decision making," she said. European governments spent billions of dollars buying pandemic vaccines and antiviral drugs that went largely unused because the flu remained mild. The European Medicines Agency yesterday said three companies distributed more than 179 million doses of pandemic vaccine in Western Europe, of which at least a fifth was used. http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/article487469.ece/British-journal-slams-WHO |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 5:51:50 AM EDT
[#1]
It's a good thing climate scientists aren't as self-serving as these medical scientists. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 5:52:03 AM EDT
[#2]
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Posted: 6/4/2010 5:54:03 AM EDT
[#3]
I always suspected that. We had a "huge epidemic" all over the world & then bam it was gone just as fast as it came. I'm so glad my family & I never got an H1N1 "vaccine"
Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 5:54:51 AM EDT
[#4]
If this was an oil company, the world liberals would already have drawn and quartered them.
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Posted: 6/4/2010 5:55:35 AM EDT
[#5]
Unpossible, science will not allow this to happen
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Posted: 6/4/2010 5:55:57 AM EDT
[#6]
peak pig flu!
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Posted: 6/4/2010 5:59:37 AM EDT
[#7]
Shocking.
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:00:32 AM EDT
[#8]
Quoted: Shocking. Agreed. It smelled of scam from the beginning. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:01:53 AM EDT
[#9]
Quoted:
I always suspected that. We had a "huge epidemic" all over the world & then bam it was gone just as fast as it came. I'm so glad my family & I never got an H1N1 "vaccine" Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile Yep, think of all those sheep who rushed out to get the vaccination and it was just a money making effort under the veil of 'science'. At the WHO's annual assembly its chief adviser on flu, Keiji Fukuda, said it was a cause for great satisfaction that predictions of hundreds of thousands of deaths had not materialised. However, some experts say the WHO should have realised early on that the H1NI strain of swine flu was a mild virus.
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:02:11 AM EDT
[#10]
I have no faith or trust in EITHER Establishment,,
 wouldn't believe them if I was dieing of Bird FLU...
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:02:53 AM EDT
[#11]
I was living in South Africa during the whole thing and it was never a big deal there. Its too bad that I missed out on the show this side.
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:03:19 AM EDT
[#12]
Quoted: I always suspected that. We had a "huge epidemic" all over the world & then bam it was gone just as fast as it came. I'm so glad my family & I never got an H1N1 "vaccine" Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile Me or mine either. I'm glad I don't go out and get shot up with everything under the sun that I'm told I need. One day what was good for you is now bad for you and the next what was bad is now good and looks like this particular one wasn't even an issue. I'll just let my body do it's job, thanks. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:05:47 AM EDT
[#13]
Exactly why I didn't get a flu shot this year. Had nothing to do with the risk of.............the risk of.........................the.............oh shit, I got autism! |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:09:29 AM EDT
[#14]
Harvey Fineberg, who is the President of the Institute of Medicine in Washington said that they want to examine the WHO records and the agreements between pharmaceuticals and industry, which also include certain confidential documents, that may be in place here at WHO or elsewhere.
Tax payer money basically stolen for useless vaccines. Roughly 65 million doses of swine flu vaccine sit unused or expired in clinics, doctor’s offices, and warehouses across the United States as the virus that once stoked fears of a devastating global epidemic has retreated. Most of the leftover shots and nasal spray, about 40 percent of what the federal government ordered, will be destroyed.
The purchase of so much vaccine, at a cost of $1.6 billion, was a calculated gamble made early in the epidemic, when it was impossible to know the virus would prove less harmful than some specialists had forecast. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:10:05 AM EDT
[#15]
In before the "Vaccines are good, my family is fine" crowd.
Sadly, this is not surprising. My whole family knew this was a scam from the beginning. Glad this is finally getting out. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:12:30 AM EDT
[#16]
Actually this is not a real surprise, realistically scientists are always in someones pocket. Unless .gov wants to step up and provide essentially lifetime funding/appointments for scientists this is something people will have to learn to live with. Kinda like supreme court appointments are basically for life so they can't easily be bought.
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:14:35 AM EDT
[#17]
While the scientists were self severing, do not exclude politicians & lame stream media in this lastest fiasco.
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:16:33 AM EDT
[#18]
Didnt that one cheerleader girl become a vegetable after taking the vaccine?
I wouldnt want that on my conscience. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:18:12 AM EDT
[#19]
Quoted:
I always suspected that. We had a "huge epidemic" all over the world & then bam it was gone just as fast as it came. I'm so glad my family & I never got an H1N1 "vaccine" Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile No choice, Army, both myself and my wife. Our kids school tried to give it to them and we declined, multiple times. I think it annoyed them. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:19:24 AM EDT
[#20]
Quoted: Didnt that one cheerleader girl become a vegetable after taking the vaccine? I wouldnt want that on my conscience. She faked the entire thing. She was caught on camera with nothing wrong with her last I heard. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:21:52 AM EDT
[#21]
Quoted:
Quoted:
Didnt that one cheerleader girl become a vegetable after taking the vaccine? I wouldnt want that on my conscience. She faked the entire thing. She was caught on camera with nothing wrong with her last I heard. Wow, I hadnt heard that. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:21:59 AM EDT
[#22]
Basically, the World Health Organization staff and leadership are anti-scientific. They don't even follow their own guidelines and have 'secret' committees to advise the WHO's General Manager. In fact, the WHO won't even respond to requests about its shady practices to the British Medical Journal –– so much for transparency in medical research.
The damning report goes on to say that “this lack of transparency is compounded by the existence of a secret ‘emergency committee’ which advised the WHO's director general Margaret Chan on declaring an influenza pandemic”. It adds that “significantly, the names of the 16 committee members are known only to people within the WHO, and as such their possible conflicts of interest with drug companies are unknown”.
The WHO has repeatedly denied any industry influence on the scientific advice it received, saying it takes conflicts of interests seriously and has the mechanisms in place to deal with them. However the BMJ and the Bureau suggest that the organisation “seems not to have followed its own rules for the decision-making around the pandemic”. The report concludes that “despite repeated requests”, the WHO has refused to provide any information about the conflict of interest declarations made to it, leaving the investigation to wonder "whether major public health organisations are able to manage the conflicts of interest that are inherent in medical science effectively." |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:25:07 AM EDT
[#23]
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:27:47 AM EDT
[#24]
i believe it
around Halloween my wife started to get sick with what felt like the flu... went to her doctor and they put her on tamiflu and a z-pack (antibiotics for a viral infection seems odd to me)... she felt fine in a day or two... a couple weeks later (good thing this wasn't life threatening) they called her with the lab results... positive for H1N1... i remember sitting in bed with her watching the World Series and at one point i got really hot and had a temperature of like 102F. I was achy and tired, would fall asleep for about an hour or so, i drank about a gallon of water and slept. the next morning i was fine. I never got tested or took any medication, i can only assume that since my wife and i share a bed that i too had H1N1... our symptoms were mild fever, achiness, and fatigue. no vomiting, diarrhea, etc. in fact, we were both really hungry during the whole thing. H1N1 wasn't as bad as the regular old flu that people get every year. my friend's wife is a pharmacist, when this whole H1N1 fiasco was going on, we were talking about it, she told me that they had tons of H1N1 vaccines just sitting on their shelves that were close to expiring and it was sort of a strange coincidence that all of a sudden... OMG a pandemic! 
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:29:41 AM EDT
[#25]
I did not get my shot, but I got a stroke.
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:35:58 AM EDT
[#26]
The supermarket that I frequent, (Carrs, Safeway) here in Alaska, still has a sign saying "H1N1 flue vaccines available, talk to your pharmacist, yada yada" in the front window.
I had to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy section so I inquired as the reason for still inoculating people for a 'pandemic' which isn't even a blip on anyone's screen. The reply was, "well, it still might make a resurgence". Translation, "we bought too much of the damn stuff and are still trying to foist it on people who will believe anything".
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:40:55 AM EDT
[#27]
The whole thing was a scam so the Gov't could tag as many people as possible with RFID's when they got the "H1N1 shot".
Too bad for them, the People weren't that stupid! 
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:46:52 AM EDT
[#28]
Quoted:
Actually this is not a real surprise, realistically scientists are always in someones pocket. Unless .gov wants to step up and provide essentially lifetime funding/appointments for scientists this is something people will have to learn to live with. Kinda like supreme court appointments are basically for life so they can't easily be bought. +1 Although if the gov't pays for all their research, then they're in the pockets of the gov't. 
As a doc, I'm always skeptical about any new drug that comes on the market. I'll usually start prescribing it once I've exhausted all other options. Many times the new drug is worthless from a practical standpoint (too many side effects, etc), but other times it is far and away much better than ones in current use. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:48:10 AM EDT
[#29]
Quoted:
Quoted:
Didnt that one cheerleader girl become a vegetable after taking the vaccine? I wouldnt want that on my conscience. She faked the entire thing. She was caught on camera with nothing wrong with her last I heard. It could also have been Conversion Disorder. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:48:44 AM EDT
[#30]
Quoted:
It's a good thing climate scientists aren't as self-serving as these medical scientists. LMAO 
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:51:34 AM EDT
[#31]
Quoted: It's a good thing climate scientists aren't as self-serving as these medical scientists. DING!! First Post Winner, as usual.
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:54:57 AM EDT
[#32]
Quoted:
Exactly why I didn't get a flu shot this year. Had nothing to do with the risk of.............the risk of.........................the.............oh shit, I got autism! Vaccines don't cause autism. pato |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 6:59:08 AM EDT
[#33]
Quoted:
i believe it around Halloween my wife started to get sick with what felt like the flu... went to her doctor and they put her on tamiflu and a z-pack (antibiotics for a viral infection seems odd to me)... she felt fine in a day or two... a couple weeks later (good thing this wasn't life threatening) they called her with the lab results... positive for H1N1... i remember sitting in bed with her watching the World Series and at one point i got really hot and had a temperature of like 102F. I was achy and tired, would fall asleep for about an hour or so, i drank about a gallon of water and slept. the next morning i was fine. I never got tested or took any medication, i can only assume that since my wife and i share a bed that i too had H1N1... our symptoms were mild fever, achiness, and fatigue. no vomiting, diarrhea, etc. in fact, we were both really hungry during the whole thing. H1N1 wasn't as bad as the regular old flu that people get every year. my friend's wife is a pharmacist, when this whole H1N1 fiasco was going on, we were talking about it, she told me that they had tons of H1N1 vaccines just sitting on their shelves that were close to expiring and it was sort of a strange coincidence that all of a sudden... OMG a pandemic! The flu itself wasn't killing people. What was killing them was the secondary upper respiratory infections––thus the z-pack. The other thing is that it wasn't killing the normal population that the seasonal flu does––the very young and the very old. H1N1 was killing those that usually have little issue with the flu. I can't speak for PA, but in Texas, nobody was tested for H1N1 specifically unless they died or they were hospitalized with influenze like illness for longer than 48 hours. If you were Flu-A positive on the rapid test––you were presumptively postive for H1N1, but specific testing wasn't done. pato |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 7:00:45 AM EDT
[#34]
no really?
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Posted: 6/4/2010 7:07:46 AM EDT
[#35]
Quoted: It's a good thing climate scientists aren't as self-serving as these medical scientists. First post wins again! |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 7:07:48 AM EDT
[#36]
it may have been over-rated but my wife and i were both pretty ill last july with the flu.
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Posted: 6/4/2010 7:15:34 AM EDT
[#37]
Quoted:
it may have been over-rated but my wife and i were both pretty ill last july with the flu. I think the issue here is that the docs that recommended stockpiling mass amounts of vaccine by .gov were getting paid by big pharma. Realistically this in my mind isn't much different from other lobbying groups. The Flu is real, but stockpiling big amounts of the vaccine was probably unnecessary. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 7:18:28 AM EDT
[#38]
Obviously, there are some ethical questions here. However, the bulk of antiviral medications were purchased years ago for H5N1 (Bird flu) not H1N1. The article misrepresents some information here.
As for vaccine....damned when there wasn't enough to go around....damned when there was too much. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 7:19:38 AM EDT
[#39]
Quoted:
In before the "Vaccines are good, my family is fine" crowd. Sadly, this is not surprising. My whole family knew this was a scam from the beginning. Glad this is finally getting out. Ok, I'll bite. There are 2 bits of confusion that have been propagated, mostly by the media for the headlines. 1) "Pandemic" is a description of how widespread an infectious disease is, and how easily it gets transmitted from person to person. Period. It has NOTHING to do with mortality or morbidity. The WHO and the CDC use published guidelines for declaring an epidemic or a pandemic, and H1N1 qualifies. It IS/WAS a pandemic - it just wasn't the zombie apocalypse type. The irony is that bird flu ALSO qualified for "epidemic" status, but the CDC and WHO refused to declare it so, for fear that this same sort of confusion would occur. 2) The public health measures taken were against the potential that H1N1 would get deadlier, and with good reason - the morbidity and mortality rate was significantly higher than that of seasonal flu. There were a number of cases where people died in a manner very different from seasonal flu, and very similar to the 1918 flu. So, faced with the possibility that things could get ugly, governments took measures. It's the same reason many here buy guns - better to have and not need than need and not have. This is playing out exactly like Y2K - there's a real risk, media spin it up into TEOTWAWKI, and money gets spent doing stuff. When the smoke clears and catastrophe didn't happen, people pop up and say "Look, it was a scam!". But here's the real question: was there never the potential for a disaster, or did the measures taken actually work? We never really go back and answer that question. So, was a greater pandemic avoided because of the vaccinations, or was there never that potential? The fact that one didn't get vaccinated and still avoided H1N1 means nothing - look up "herd immunity" on Wikipedia. Me? I believe that things COULD have been very ugly, and that the risk was real. This time we fell on the good side of the probability curve - time to celebrate. But I'm not going to throw away my flu preps, for the same reason I don't throw away my guns because I'm in a "safe" neighborhood. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 7:31:28 AM EDT
[#40]
Quoted:
I always suspected that. We had a "huge epidemic" all over the world & then bam it was gone just as fast as it came. I'm so glad my family & I never got an H1N1 "vaccine" Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile Yep, no vaccines here either. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 8:26:17 AM EDT
[#41]
YIp. no big shock there.
I never fell for the hype, never got the shot and was never worried about it. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 8:41:08 AM EDT
[#42]
Well, they had to have a reason to get the RFID tags into people somehow.
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Posted: 6/4/2010 8:44:02 AM EDT
[#43]
Quoted:
It's a good thing climate scientists aren't as self-serving as these medical scientists. 
I see what you did there. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 8:49:46 AM EDT
[#44]
Could the scientists have been unethical and inflated the severity of the issue for monetary gain? Yes.
But it's equally as likely that they were on the payrolls of the large drug companies mentioned because they're experts in their field. Without further evidence, I don't think their prior employment history demonstrates abuse. As far as it being a pandemic... well... according to the definition of the term, it was. Pandemic <> lethality. IMO, the main players responsible for building up the hype was the media. That's what they do. Make news out of no news at all. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 8:59:31 AM EDT
[#45]
Quoted:
Quoted:
Quoted:
Didnt that one cheerleader girl become a vegetable after taking the vaccine? I wouldnt want that on my conscience. She faked the entire thing. She was caught on camera with nothing wrong with her last I heard. Wow, I hadnt heard that. Yeah she was videotaped walking out of a store and then driving away. They even approached her and talked to her. She said she just got better IIRC |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 9:03:27 AM EDT
[#46]
You just wait, you H1N1 deniers. So smug, all of you.
One of these years the flu is going to come roaring back, taking the vaccine community by suprise, and kill millions of healthy adults in low-income crowded urban environments, and ... and... oh, never mind. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 9:05:53 AM EDT
[#47]
Quoted:
Quoted:
Shocking. Agreed. It smelled of scam from the beginning. I smelled scam to scare public support for the healthcare bill, but this is just as bad. |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 9:06:34 AM EDT
[#48]
Quoted:
It's a good thing climate scientists aren't as self-serving as these medical scientists.
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Posted: 6/4/2010 9:34:09 AM EDT
[#49]
 |
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Posted: 6/4/2010 9:40:19 AM EDT
[#50]
Quoted:
Could the scientists have been unethical and inflated the severity of the issue for monetary gain? Yes. But it's equally as likely that they were on the payrolls of the large drug companies mentioned because they're experts in their field. Without further evidence, I don't think their prior employment history demonstrates abuse. You missed the fact that conflicts of interest reports were intentionally ignored violating WHO policies. As far as it being a pandemic... well... according to the definition of the term, it was. Pandemic <> lethality. FALSE. The long held definition of 'pandemic' was changed 1 week before the WHO announced the swine flu 'pandemic' at the urging of consultants for big pharma working for WHO. IMO, the main players responsible for building up the hype was the media. That's what they do. Make news out of no news at all. |
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