Remember this?
This was a pretty common scene on your TV screens back in 2006.
We were being warned about a pandemic, a global outbreak, of bird flu.
In Britain alone, some people were predicting it could kill as many as three quarters of
a million.
But by November 29 2006, the world health organisation, was reporting a global death
toll of 154.
Although there were huge culls of birds.
The fear of getting caught out by a pandemic prompted governments to stockpile an antiviral
drug called Tamiflu, which is produced by the pharmaceutical company Roche.
In fact that fear of a flu pandemic prompted the UK government to spend five hundred million
pounds on stockpiling the drug.
In Canada, they spent 67.5 million dollars stockpiling Tamiflu and Relenza, which is
another antiviral, but produced by GlaxoSmithKline.
Sales were so successful that Roche reported a rise in profits of 8 percent in early 2010,
following the swine flu outbreak, where in the UK at least, Tamiflu was heavily prescribed.
So, in order to create those huge sales and profits and make their shareholders happy,
what had they done?
Well, you would assume that they had produced a wonder drug.
But a new study suggest that that might not be the case.
Following questions from the scientific community, Roche eventually agreed to hand over all the
data from their clinical trials for independent analysis by the Cochrane Collaboration.
It's a common practice for pharmaceutical companies to withhold trial data and cherry
pick information that suits their needs to get a drug to market.
Creating false positives that reduce the appearance of side-effects and promote the efficacy of
a drug.
And it's totally legal in the UK and in many places in around the world for the drugs companies
to withhold that information.
Now the Cochrane Collaboration is a global organisation, a not for profit organisation,
which consists of about 14,000 academics, some of whom sifted through the evidence from
Roche.
And their finding was that Tamiflu was not a wonder drug at all.
In fact, they found that it was no more effective than paracetamol at treating flu.
They found that the drug reduced flu symptoms from 7 days down to 6.3 days in adults and
5.8 days in children.
They also said there was "no visible effect" on the prevention of complications resulting
from flu, like pneumonia for example.
There wasn't enough data to see if Tamiful actually reduces deaths and the report's authors
also found that the drug does have adverse side effects that had been dismissed or overlooked.
One of the key things about medication is you've got to show benefits.
There are no benefits to show with these drugs that should then say these harms should be
outweighed.
So no benefits, all you will do is accentuate the harms.
If you start to scale this up on a large scale, you're going to see a number of people with
psychiatric adverse events, you'll see people with renal adverse events, you'll see a lot
of people not able to take the drug because there'll be nausea, vomiting and headaches.
So you take all that together and there will be a substantial proportion of people who
will be at harm.
In response, Roche has criticised the conclusions of the study and has said that they could
"potentially have serious public health implications".
They argue that the Cochrane group used the wrong statistics and had ended up underestimating
the benefits of the drug by using unorthodox methods.
In fact, here's Roche's UK medical director, Dr Daniel Thurley:
The results of the Cochrane group are really an anomaly because the same data has been
provided to 100 regulators around the world, they've had access to all the data, all the
way through that they've needed for their assessments and they've concluded that Tamiflu
and the other medicines are important treatments for patients with flu and also to prevent
people catching flu if they come into contact with somebody who has flu.
No in defence of the Cochrane Collaboration's defence, Ben Goldacre describes them as the
gold-standard in medicine, because they summarise all of the data on a given treatment, and
they are in constant review cycle.
So was it a colossal waste of taxpayers money by governments around the world to stockpile
Tamiflu?
Were regulators and governments misled by the perfectly legal practice of withholding
data?
And if they were, shouldn't the laws on data publication be changed?
What do you reckon of the Cochrane review's process?.
You guys make your own minds up, let us know what you think in the comments.
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