In the years leading up to 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) worked alongside vaccine manufacturers, namely GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), to ensure that European and African countries entered into contracts to vaccinate their citizens in the event of an unforeseen global flu pandemic.

These dormant, or "sleeping contracts," stipulated that if a global pandemic were to occur, it would trigger the contracts, specified pharmaceutical companies would manufacture flu vaccines and the respective governments would pay the vaccine manufacturers.

On June 11, 2009, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan declared H1N1 swine flu to be a global pandemic, triggering the dormant contracts and throwing the pharmaceutical and vaccine industry into high gear.

Chan was able to make this declaration based on WHO's official definition of a pandemic, which was updated just a month before declaring the H1N1 pandemic — WHO deleted its definition of a pandemic from the organization's website and replaced it with a new, more flexible definition.