Michael Fumento

Even before the World Health Organization declared its phony pandemic last summer, its designated fibber-in-chief has been Keiji Fukuda. Yet I've never been able to catch him a lie so explicit that he couldn't somehow worm out of it. Till now.

Thus when he said (and still does), the virus may be mild now but it could mutate to become worse I would point out that this would be the first time a flu virus has suddenly changed course like that. But technically he was right. Finally, I've caught him with his nose stretched out three feet long - and on a vital issue.

As I pointed out upon the WHO's pandemic declaration in June, the previous definition required "enormous numbers of deaths." But the agency desperately wanted a pandemic and swine flu, vastly milder than ordinary flu, clearly didn't fit. So they simply penned a new definition to match swine flu, making deaths irrelevant and explicitly declaring "mild" strains would qualify.

Since flu always strikes throughout the world, the only reasonable distinction between a normal year and a pandemic year is severity. So clearly this was politically motivated, and I've addressed those motivations. They include everything from power grabbing and money grubbing to a hard left agenda of redistributing wealth and instituting "social justice."

Now the WHO is defending itself against charges of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) that it created a "false pandemic" in "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century." To which the WHO disingenuously responds that it is a real pandemic - by its fresh and nonsensical interpretation.

But the WHO can't change what the old definition said. At the PACE hearing, though, Fukuda boldly told the assembled experts, reporters, and, yes, cameramen: "Having severe deaths has never been part of the WHO definition."

Here's a snapshot of the WHO definition, also viewable at the agency's Web site, at the very time swine flu broke out.

Moreover, at a "virtual press conference" ten days earlier, he stated:"Did WHO change its definition of a pandemic? The answer is no, WHO did not change its definition." The man is an arrogant lying machine.

First WHO Director-General Margaret Chan needs to fire Fukuda. And then she needs to fire herself.