"Tamiflu: Millions wasted on flu drug, claims major report"

From the BBC:

Hundreds of millions of pounds have been wasted on a drug for flu that works better than paracetamol, a landmark analysis has said.

The UK has spent £473m on Tamiflu, which is stockpiled by governments globally to prepare for flu pandemics.

Countdown

The Trade Union Congress claimed the drug helped prevent the spread of flu and reduce dangerous complications, thus depriving millions of workers a well-earned extra couple of days off once or twice a year, which most choose to spend in bed watching daytime television.

Loose women

TUC General Secretary Frances O'Grady said: "The NHS was a great post-war Labour achievement, intended to help the neediest in society.

"But it seems that it is now little more than a mechanism to force our hardworking members to pay for treatments which prevent them from taking some much deserved time off work on full pay. That's sort of missing the point, isn't it?"

Homes under the hammer

The manufacturers Roche and other experts say the analysis is flawed and in a surprising retraction, Roche have now claimed that Tamiflu is a mere placebo with no medical benefits whatsoever.

A bit of good news at long last!

From the BBC:

The swine flu pandemic has been declared officially over by the World Health Organization.

The body said it was moving to the "post-pandemic phase" after many countries, including the UK, had scaled down their emergency measures. WHO director general Dr Margaret Chan said the virus had "largely run its course".

Millions of people were affected across the world by the infection after it emerged in April last year. But the pandemic - the first for 40 years - proved much less deadly than many had feared. In the UK, more than 450 people died, but that was well short of the 65,000 predicted as the worst-case scenario.

Jolly good. I can cross that off my "Things to worry about" list. Ah... I did that over a year ago. Oh well.

"WHO swine flu experts 'linked' with drug companies"

There's not much to add to this article from the BBC apart from the traditional 'We suspected as much.'

How did we miss this one?

Plenty of people had assumed that the whole 'Mexican swine 'flu pandemic' was just a massive scare story engineered by Big Pharma to try and shift some fairly useless vaccines. The story is trundling on, and was trailed briefly on Radio 4 this morning (some time between 7.15 and 7.30), the best summary I can find online is in The Grauniad:

The World Health Organisation and other public health bodies have "gambled away" public confidence by overstating the dangers of the flu pandemic, according to a draft report to the Council of Europe. The report, by the Labour MP Paul Flynn, vice chair of the council's health committee, says that a loss of credibility could endanger lives...

In Britain, says Flynn, the discrepancy between the estimate of the numbers of people who would die from flu and the reality was dramatic. "In the United Kingdom, the Department of Health initially announced that around 65,000 deaths were to be expected. In the meantime, by the start of 2010, this estimate was downgraded to only 1,000 fatalities. By January 2010, fewer than 5,000 persons had been registered as having caught the disease and about 360 deaths had been noted," says his report...

Flynn's draft accuses the WHO of a lack of transparency. Some members of its advisory groups are flu experts who have also received funding, especially for research projects, from pharmaceutical companies making drugs and vaccines against flu...

The second evidence session will be held in Paris tomorrow. The witnesses will include the Polish health minister, Ewa Kopacz, who will explain why her government decided not to order any H1N1 vaccines...

Fun Online Polls: privately collected taxes & Tiger Woods

I am pleased to see that on a low-ish turnout (86 votes), 80% of people who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll agreed with the statement "All money that changes hands purely because of existing laws (as distinct from free exchange) counts as 'tax'."

I gave examples of such privately collected taxes last week, the basic idea being that all 'rent-seekers' (such as Messrs Osterhaus and Pachauri, who are on the swine-flu and climate-change bandwagons respectively) are trying to funnel money into their own pockets. Whether that goes via the state (i.e. our taxes pay for the NHS, which then pays for immunisations and Tamiflu) or direct from one private business to another (selling carbon permits which your business obtained for free) is neither here nor there.

The problem is that while right-wingers lambast this type of rent-seeking, they have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the rent-seeking that they indulge in themselves, primarily via the land market. A majority of commenters on this post thought it was an outrage to expect those land-owners who stand to benefit enormously from the construction of Crossrail to make some sort of modest financial contribution to its construction costs, even if the decision to do so were taken democratically.

With that in mind, it puzzles me that so many people voted as they did. Ah well.
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In a more light-hearted vein, and inspired by Rantin' Rab, this week's Fun Online Poll asks "Have you had an affair with Tiger Woods?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

United Nations fun

I get the impression that both of these stories are a little exaggerated, but where there's smoke there's fire...

First story emailed by Bayard:

The man with the nickname “Dr Flu”, Professor Albert Osterhaus, of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam Holland has been named by Dutch media researchers as the person at the center of the worldwide Swine Flu H1N1 Influenza A 2009 pandemic hysteria.

Not only is Osterhaus the connecting person in an international network that has been described as the Pharma Mafia, he is THE key advisor to WHO on influenza and is intimately positioned to personally profit from the billions of euros in vaccines allegedly aimed at H1N1...

Second story via UKIP:

A story emerging out of Britain suggests "follow the money" may explain the enthusiasm of the United Nations to pursue caps on carbon emissions, despite doubts surfacing in the scientific community about the validity of the underlying global warming hypothesis.

A Mumbai-based Indian multinational conglomerate with business ties to Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman since 2002 of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, stands to make several hundred million dollars in European Union carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain with the loss of 1,700 jobs...

Sir Liam Donaldson on top form

From The Grauniad:

The first flu pandemic of the 21st century is less lethal than experts feared, killing only 26 out of every 100,000 people who became ill, a study by the chief medical officer reveals today... a third of deaths have been among healthy people who would not have been eligible for vaccination under the present strategy...

Good stuff, you might think, panic over, we might as well not bother with the billions to be spent on the vaccine - given those sort of numbers it would be nigh impossible to prove that the vaccine actually led to a statistically significant reduction in the number of deaths.

Nope:

Sir Liam Donaldson and colleagues say in their paper published online that vaccination may have to be extended to a wider population than at present.

[Dilemma] Whom do you trust less ...

... the UK Government/NHS or the World Health Organisation?

Fun with numbers

Number of people who die from 'flu in the UK each year: 6,000 on average

Number of people who have died of swine 'flu in the UK so far: 59

Number of people who have died of something else after being misdiagnosed with swine 'flu in the UK so far: 5

Once is circumstance, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action ...

Aug 8: Health bosses are investigating whether a two-year-old girl who died from suspected meningitis was wrongly diagnosed with swine flu.

Aug 13: Jasvir Kaur Gill, 48, died of meningitis last week after being wrongly diagnosed with the [swine 'flu] virus.

Aug 13: Stop phone diagnosis say family of North Wales teen who died [of tonsilitis] after being told he [sic] had swine flu

Epic Fail Of The Day

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).

Swine 'flu is funny again: official

Wouldn't the risk be zero?

Headline from the BBC:

Flu risk 'still low' after death

Faux outrage?

OK, we've done the MPs' expenses story to death by now. But unless we're all prepared to vote tactically against the sitting MP, through gritted teeth if necessary, they'll know that they can get away with it time and time again.

So that's the topic of this week's Fun Online Poll, are you prepared to put your 'X' where your mouth is? Seeing as the incumbent parties are all as bad as each other, I suppose that this would lead to a Parliament consisting mainly of UKIP, Greens and BNP. Now that would make politics interesting again!
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PS, if there are any swine-whisperers reading this, perhaps you can help me make sense of these responses:

Have you got Mexican Swine 'Flu?
Oink - 27 votes
Snuffle - 4 votes
Grunt - 14 votes

I'm an "oink", by the way, I hope that means "no".

"Doctor, doctor ...

... hi, I didn't want to come in to the surgery because I've got [flicks to last page of leaflet] 'a sudden onset of fever, a cough and shortness of breath. I've also got a headache, a sore throat, tiredness, aching muscles, chills, sneezing, a runny nose and I've lost my appetite' ... Right, OK ... so you'll send my sicknote for work in the post, there's no need for me to collect it? OK, thanks ... no, no, I'll ring again if I need a home visit ... OK, goodbye."

Trial By Internet: The People Have Spoken

Thanks to everybody who cast a vote and thanks to HNL for linking. The jury returned the following verdict on Kate and Gerry McCann:

Entirely innocent - 1%
Victims of unfortunate circumstances - 7%
Negligent but not criminal - 16%
(subtotal 24%)
There's something a bit fishy about all this - 39%
(subtotal 39%)
They aren't telling the full truth - 20%
Guilty as Hell - 13%
(subtotal 33%)
Who are Kate and Gerry McCann? - 5%

Unhampered as I am by even the scantiest knowledge of Portuguese criminal law, AFAIAC, that's nowhere near enough for a conviction, possibly not even enough to justify an arrest and I guess we'll never find out what happened.

Similarly unburdened, HNL points out that "71% think that the whole truth has not come out... Sorry Kate and Gerry you just are going to have to do better.".

Hmm. Perhaps we should have agreed the rules first.
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This week's Fun Online Poll: Have you got Mexican Swine 'Flu?

John Lewis store closed due to pandemic

Dr Margaret Chan

Readers' letters of the day

Both from The Metro:

I always said that bird 'flu didn't scare me because I am a bloke. But as a male chauvinist pig, I must admit the latest outbreak has got me worried. I think the government is taking things too far by introducing these disease-equality measures.
Bob Harris, Birmingham

and

Why are Britons in Spain 'expats' but Poles in Britan 'immigrants'?
Al, London.

Blamin' the Yanks

Ross has produced a handy Q&A on Mexican Swine 'Flu, which includes this:

Mexico is right next door to the United States, is there any means by which we can blame America for the crisis? Not yet but researchers are investigating various possibilities.

Tim W reports that The Graun made a half-hearted attempt, which he dismantled here.

Here's my attempt:

"The USA imposed a free trade agreement (NAFTA) on Mexico, which prevents the Mexicans from protecting and developing their fledgling economy. As a result, Mexicans are reduced to meeting the Americans' instatiable appetite for basic agricultural products. The USA deprives Mexico of the capital required for investment in modern hygienic farming methods, so Mexican pig-farming is very labour-intensive, which exposes the workers to a high risk of intra-species infection."

As this is a lefty theory, I haven't bothered backing this up with any facts or evidence (thus making it all the more difficult to refute).