Looking back at 2009 shows Big Pharma weathered a year of big mergers, a big pandemic, big job cuts, and the promise of big changes to health care in Washington.

The industry got spiked with the arrival of the year's leading concern as the H1N1 virus put swine flu on every firm's plate. The race was exhilarating as firms hurried out versions of vaccines to quell public fears and kicked up a renewed interest in vaccines. The virus served a shot in the arm for Novartis, Sanofi-Pasteur and GlaxoSmithKline amidst other industry uncertainties.

Those uncertainties? All the while there was a crop of capital-M mergers underway that shook up the industry. Three major M&As dominated the scene – and with them came the inevitability of job cuts leading to the slash of jobs. Most significantly, Pfizer bought Wyeth and Merck picked up Schering-Plough – then started axing positions in an effort to iron out redundancies.

But the industry is still worried about what could lie ahead. The impending patent cliff is a chief motivator to nearly every financial activity as firms try not to careen over the edge with all their big prescription eggs in one basket.

Per FiercePharma, 58,696 pharmaceutical and biotech jobs have been cut through the end of October of this year -- some 15,000 more jobs lost than in all of 2008. Here they pass on the report on all of the big cuts from 2009. Into 2010, analysts are holding out for at least a bit more of the same. Meanwhile, the swine flu story continues with a new chapter of doubt: The World Health Organization is set to examine how it handled the pandemic as some politicians accuse that it exaggerated the severity of the situation under pressure from drug companies.