Tamiflu Doesn't Work

Many of us - including the World Health Organization (WHO) - have been relying on the idea of Tamiflu to get us through this treacherous swine flu season.  Make no mistake, swine flu is serious - a friend of mine's three year old son had to spend several days in the ICU thanks to swine flu.  Pretty scary stuff, if you're a parent.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Tamiflu does not actually work, and according to The Atlantic, it may actually cause more harm than good.  The British Medical Journal periodically reviews the effectiveness of various medicines, in order to update its own readership on the latest statistics.  When they went digging into the effectiveness statistics for Tamiflu, they found that, as The Atlantic puts it, "The dog ate my homework."

The British Medical Journal team found that only two of the ten Tamiflu studies had been published in proper medical journals. And that in both of those studies, Tamiflu was not shown to be significantly more useful than a placebo.  Red flag!

When the researchers asked Roche, the manufacturer of the drug, to provide the raw data from their studies, they received only "a hodgepodge of data."  The labs which had originally done the testing came up with a variety of excuses, including one lab which claimed to have lost the data in a move.  

The real bomb was dropped by some former employees of Adis International, a marketing firm, who admitted that they had ghostwritten some published Tamiflu studies.  These studies had been concocted whole cloth by a marketing firm, using nothing but Roche's list of bullet points they wanted the authors to hit.

The British Medical Journal team concluded that Tamiflu is useless, and the FDA and NICE (the UK's version of the FDA) concluded.  Although the FDA has temporarily approved Tamiflu for patients who are hospitalized with the flu and at risk of dying (perhaps thinking that under such circumstances, a placebo is better than nothing), they have also demanded that Roche place an ineffectiveness warning on all Tamiflu packages, stating that there is no clinical data proving that Tamiflu performs better than a placebo.

Despite Tamiflu's proven lack of effectiveness, many public agencies are still stockpiling it against a global flu pandemic.  $3 billion dollars worth, according to the Atlantic article.  Why?  

The Atlantic strongly implies that this is because it behooves public agencies to be seen to be doing something to prepare for a pandemic, but the truth is that there is nothing that can be done.  "We have a stockpile of Tamiflu" thus becomes the same kind of pantomime as the "duck and cover" routines of the 1950s, or the "duct tape your windows" advice against bioterrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

In an interesting way, this vested interest in preserving the mock efficacy of Tamiflu is a lot like the way we end up overmedicating viruses and causing antibiotic-resistant diseases like MRSA.  Sometimes when the public demands that you DO SOMETHING, whether it's prepare for the un-preparable (like a flu pandemic), or dispense an antibiotic prescription for an illness that won't benefit from it (like a virus).  Not to get all blame-the-victim-y, but surely we are all a little to blame for the Tamiflu lie.