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Flu Treatment a Hoax: The Tale of Tamiflu
| January 6, 2010 | |
| Dr. Gary Huber : Head Medical Ego |
Hired Guns
Apparently during all this search for data, two former employees from Adis International, a large communications company, came forward with documents showing that they had been the ghostwriters hired by Roche.
They testified that Roche paid them to forge a fake study that showed Tamiflu was the wonder drug for influenza.
This is how Roche makes its living yet no one is in jail? The FDA told Roche that they needed to change the labeling on their product to state that “it has not been proven to have a positive effect.”
What? You can keep the billions of stolen dollars just change the labeling? This makes me long for the days of Enron and Ponzi schemes.
Oh, but the insanity continues.
For the People?
Nancy Cox heads the Center for Disease Control (CDC) flu program and states that new studies to evaluate Tamiflu’s efficacy are not needed as it has already been shown to be effective. Oh it has? Where? When?
Our federal government has spent $1.5 billion dollars stockpiling Tamiflu since 1995 to protect our troops in case of a pandemic. They have a synthetic drug compound that is worthless and we paid the bill.
The Final Kick
We now know this drug has little to no effect against the flu, has not been shown to reduce pneumonia or hospitalizations or deaths from flu exposure so it must be a benign entity right? Not so fast. Here is what was reported in the December 2009, British Medical Journal article:
Possible harms of neuraminidase inhibitors: We focused on oseltamivir (Tamiflu) because of the considerably greater global experience with this drug. Post-marketing pharmacovigilance data about oseltamivir (Tamiflu) obtained from the FDA are of limited use because of likely under-representation of reports generated from outside the United States. The entire AERS database (containing adverse event reports of all types) between 1999 and September 2007 contains only 1805 reports. However, the Roche global safety database contains reports of 2466 neuropsychiatric adverse events during this time, of which 562 (22.8%) were classified as “serious.”
Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) may induce sudden behavioral changes in recipients, including hallucination, suicidal tendencies, and sudden death while asleep. This evidence came soon after a review ordered by the Japanese government, in part triggered by the 567 serious neuropsychiatric cases received since the 2001 launch of the drug in May 2007.
Nothing like a serious psychiatric episode to make you forget about flu symptoms!
I report this information because I had earlier read information from many different outlets including the CDC and the Cochrane Collaborative report of 2006 stating that Tamiflu was beneficial. This most recent story has only come to light in the past few weeks.
I hope that now you can certainly see that Tamiflu is not the medication we were led to believe it was. I encourage you to do your own homework and form your own opinion regarding the implications of Roche’s actions.
This is not the first or last time that such dealings have emerged regarding Big Pharma. With billions of dollars at stake, your health is a small price to pay for their profits.
Buyer beware.
Sources:
My sources for this story were the ‘Neuraminidase Inhibitor‘ article appearing in the British Medical Journal, December 2009 and the review by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer in the December edition of The Atlantic.
Still worried about H1N1? This may be of interest:
H1N1 Flu Update No. 2: Surprising Numbers
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[6 Comments] [6 Comments]
Wow – all I can say…is WOW!
How on earth can no one be held responsible for those lies? How is it possible that they can pay someone to create a bogus study, they are found out, but nothing is done about it? That really makes me mad, actually!
When I had a sudden onset of flu….doctor did not want me coming to office with 101 fever…..I am 63 years old. After I started the Tamiflu the day after I had fever, within hours I was vomiting severely and felt awful. The first side effect in the med flyer was nausea, vomiting and dizziness….if it shortened the duration of my flu symptoms, I would be surprised. From the obvious flu symptoms it morphed into chest congestion and cough….serious enough that I went in to the doctor to be sure I didn’t have the beginning of pneumonia. I was then given a Z Pack.
A
Good job in highlighting this fraud. The same information on the review in British Medical Journal is documented on the wikipedia’s website and of course, the British Medical Journal’s website. What I fail to understand is why do Doctors in US still prescribe TamiFlu when there is no clear evidence that this drug is effective, especially after the first 24 hours?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseltamivir
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/dec07_2/b5106
-CW
Dear Chen,
My daughter asked me, “Daddy, why is Mom’s meatloaf so dry?” Now I had the answer for her but to offer it up in front of my wife would potentially damage that relationship and would certainly ruin any chance of getting a good night kiss. So how do I answer your question without alienating my colleagues? Thanks for putting me on the hot seat Chen.
Actually the answer is quite simple. Roche Laboratories is the pharmaceutical company that makes Tamiflu. Roche spends millions of dollars every year to hire an army of young attractive well dressed sales people to walk into every doctors office in the country every single month to remind them of the wonder benefits (lies) of Tamiflu. The CDC has recommended it. It’s been available for years and offers doctors an easy answer to offer their patients that come in with flu symptoms. So essentially it has become an American institution built on fraud and lies.
You also have to remember that medical schools don’t teach doctors anything about health or nutrition. Doctors are not taught about the benefits of vitamin D, vitamin C, anti-oxidants, and good general nutrition. They aren’t made aware of herbal treatments like andrographis, Echinacea, or homeopathic treatments. So essentially all we are given to work with is a bag of potentially toxic synthetic medications that may or may not help. So any kind hearted physician when faced with a sick patient is compelled to offer assistance any way they can and a prescription is the only tool at our disposal.
The information about Tamiflu has JUST come to light as of December so most physicians have likely not been made aware of it. But there are many other drugs and treatments that we as a medical community know are not beneficial or that offer more risk than benefit but we continue to use them because they are profitable and because that’s what all of our other colleagues are doing. The governing bodies over medicine that hold the big money contracts, will always dictate what doctors should do by proclaiming a standard of care that most doctors feel compelled to abide by.
Very nice site!