From the BBC:
Human flu jab trials 'under way'
Idiots! It's "swine 'flu" that we're worried about, not common-or-garden "human 'flu" (whatever that is).
When science is irrelevant
42 minutes ago
Wednesday, 22 July 2009
Epic Fail Of The Day
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6 comments:
Would "Human trials of flu jab under way" be more to your liking?
As a separate thought .. .. .. do pigs call the H1N1 virus human flu?
There's no way I'm going near these yet if I can avoid them.
There's a comment I found on a website concerning the US: "Getting swine flu vaccine by September means skipping all but the most preliminary clinical tests of vaccine safety and effectiveness."
We've got a really potentially dangerous situation going on. A media panic being met by Politicians Showing They Are Doing Something.
The people who decide what level of testing to be done are "independent", in the sense that they aren't. Their bills get paid by the government which ultimately means that they're subject to political interference.
Every drug has risks, but generally drugs go from trial to being released and take some time for the use of them to grow and the drugs are generally given to smallish percentages of people with specific conditions.
What they're talking about here is going from minimum trial to mass vaccination of millions immediately. Has that been done with a drug before? If there's an unforseen side effect that doesn't come out in the trial (and no drug company is ever going to say that can't happen), we're going to have an even bigger health problem on our hands.
@optimistic cynic
Gota agree. I'm not taking the flu vaccine.
Just a quick follow on with some maths..... To prove something is safe you need to give it to a very large number of people. Say for example a drug (or vaccine) causes a serious adverse event that causes death in 1 out of 100,000 people. If you test 100,000 people then one person would die. But as only 1 person died, you cant prove that the death rate is 1 in 100,000. The death rate could be 1 on 1,000,000 you cant tell. You need to test multiples of 100,000 before you can statically "prove" a death rate of 1 in 100,000.
So a trial, in say a few hundred people only proves the serious adverse event rate is not 1 in 10.
Thalidomide had all the tests.
Liam Donaldson is telling us that Swine Flu is going to be the biggest problem for the NHS for 80 years, ( not that the NHS was around 80 years ago ) with no mention that it might be a big problem for those it kills; on the other hand he declares that for most people it will not be a big deal and we should just stay in bed and get over it. confusing innit.
Likewise, Pig-Plague Vaccine Refusenik here.
Astonishingly, the BBC actually has a page on "how the numbers stack up" - which is written in a less frantic style - and confirms the figures that I'd looked up, namely that on average in the UK 12,000 a year die from "ordinary, friendly, 'flu". That's just under 33 per day. So far the beeb are claiming 31 confirmed deaths since the pandemic was "identified" - about an average day's worth. Not really worth getting too excited about IMHO.
banned,
"Thalidomide had all the tests."
Not by today's standards it didn't. It was actually thalidomide which brought in far more stringent testing of drugs.
To add to my earlier comment: I am not anti "big pharma". I believe that drug testing is about right in terms of the balance of risk in general (nothing is ever 100% safe, but the number of unforseen side effects in drugs is almost nil).
The risks with most drugs are found even before the human testing stage. The human testing stage will filter out some more problems. Then sometimes, problems are found in drugs after they are approved.
But in the case of most drugs, the rollout of approved drugs is slow. There is no political pressure to get a drug ready (and in fact, the normal pressure by agencies like the FDA is in the other direction).
All I'm saying is that I think what's being spoken of (limited trials, rapid mass vaccination) is unprecedented and it seems like no-one has considered the risks of this.
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