Roche hugely exaggerated the dangers of swine flu – and falsified the evidence suggesting Tamiflu was an effective antidote.The vaccine Tamiflu used to contain the recent swine flu pandemic was effective, but health authorities will need to ramp up the speed and volume of production during the next global outbreak, a World Health Organization (WHO) official said yesterday.
The WHO declared last month that the swine flu pandemic that started in June 2009 was over, after it killed about 18,600 people worldwide – far fewer than the worst-case scenarios in which authorities said millions could die.
The widespread use of vaccines was critical in limiting the number of casualties, with studies showing they offered protection in up to 95 per cent of cases, WHO official David Wood said at a news conference on the sidelines of an influenza conference in Hong Kong.
Some 350 million doses of the vaccine were administered worldwide, according to WHO figures.
However, a broad spectrum of experts has claimed Tamiflu doesn’t work on healthy patients who get swine flu. An investigation by the British Medical Journal found no robust data to prove that the drug prevents swine flu from becoming a serious condition. And two teams of UK academics claimed that the benefits of Tamiflu were vastly over-estimated.
Eventually, Dr Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the BMJ, said there was not enough good research on Tamiflu to prove it works on healthy patients. “Governments around the world have spent billions of pounds on a drug that the scientific community now finds itself unable to judge,” she said. The NHS wound up with more than 34 million unused doses of swine flu vaccine despite agreeing deals to break its contracts. And in Britain alone, more than £1.2billion of taxpayers’ money was spent on the swine flu pandemic – an epidemic that claimed just 411 lives in the UK – 80% of whom had serious underlying health problems in the first place.
Labour MP Paul Flynn, who investigated the handling of the outbreak for the Council of Europe, said earlier this year, “The effects of swine flu were wildly exaggerated. Scaremongering on this sort of scale must never happen again”.
But how and why did the scaremongering begin? Well, here’s one reason: Professor Sir Roy Anderson sat on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), the task force charged with containing the virus. At the time, Anderson also held a £116,000-a-year post on the board of GlaxoSmithKline – the company selling swine flu vaccine.
The original developer -Roche – systematically set out to suggest that (a) the danger from Swine Flu was far greater than in reality, and (2) concocted from thin ‘evidence’ that it was an effective anti-viral.
The problem with these claims is that they aren’t true: they were simply invented by Roche.
A groundbreaking article in the British Medical Journal accused Roche of misleading governments and physicians over the benefits of Tamiflu. Out of the ten studies cited by Roche, it turns out, only two were ever published in science journals. The data to support them has disappeared. Files were discarded. The researcher of one study says he never even saw the data. Roche took care of all that, he explains.
The Cochrane Collaboration, tasked with reviewing the data behind Tamiflu, decided to investigate. After repeated requests to Roche for the original study data, they remained stonewalled. The only complete data set they received was from an unpublished study of 1,447 adults which showed that Tamiflu was no better than placebo. Data from the studies that claimed Tamiflu was effective was apparently lost forever.
As The Atlantic reports, that’s when former employees of Adis International (essentially a Big Pharma P.R. company) shocked the medical world by announcing they had been hired to ghost-write the studies for Roche….and were told what to write. The US drugs watchdog (the FDA) today admits that Tamiflu doesn’t work. In fact, an FDA spokesperson told the British Medical Journal, “The clinical trials… failed to demonstrate any significant difference in rates of hospitalization, complications, or mortality in patients receiving either Tamiflu or placebo.”
Yet the US Government has spent over $1.5 billion stockpiling Tamiflu. And the WHO still calls it ‘effective’.
Why?
The Slog 