The Health Forum

A place for open discussions – with no cover ups – about health issues

It now looks as if the H1N1 scam – using scare tactics to make billions of people get themselves vaccinated – has been a big failure. Few people were scared. Instead, they paid heed to websites, blogs and other non-mainstream sources of information that highlighted the dangers of vaccines as well as their ineffectiveness at preventing the flu. In the end, few people got themselves vaccinated.

A small group of people did fall for the scam, however. They include mainly the Health Ministers – except the Polish Health Minister Eva Kopacz – and other government officials who ordered billions of dollars worth of vaccines. Now they are stuck with huge stockpiles of vaccines that nobody wants. They are now trying desperately to sell off their unwanted stocks. But there have been few takers because most other governments have also bought huge stockpiles. And the few that hadn’t would be foolish to buy too much, considering the low vaccination rate reported in many countries – especially the European countries that are currently going through winter, the “flu season”.

And so, from the perspective of the big pharmaceutical companies, the H1N1 scam has been a great success. They already sold billions of dollars worth of vaccines; they already laughed their way to the bank.

But… their good fortunes may be short-lived after all.

France has been especially hard-hit by the scam. The French government ordered 94 million doses of vaccines, which works out to approximately 1.5 dose for every French citizen. But only 5 million doses have so far been used up, while another 10 percent of the purchase was said to have been donated to the World Health Organisation. Early in the new year, France reported that it was trying to sell its excess vaccine stocks to countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Qatar and Egypt. Both Romania and Bulgaria have since decided not to buy the vaccines from France, while Egypt and Qatar are reported to have bought a mere 2.2 million doses.

So that leaves France with still tens of millions of unused, unwanted vaccine doses. Now France has announced that it will cancel orders for 50 million doses that have not yet been delivered. A French government spokesman said on 3 January that it had already cancelled 9 million doses from Sanofi Pasteur, and was in talks about cancelling the remaining excess supply from other companies. The French government further said that it was “confident” about not having to pay compensation to the pharmaceutical companies for the cancellations.

France is not alone. Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland have also been trying to cancel their orders, cut back on deliveries or sell their excess vaccine stocks – with limited success. The Netherlands is reported to have sold 2 million of its 19 million excess vaccine doses while Germany is said to be still in negotiations to sell 2.2 million doses to Ukraine.

Now, the latest cancellation announcement by France has got the Big Pharma boys and their investors worried. Share prices of vaccine manufacturers Glaxo, Sanofi, Novartis have all dropped!

WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?

France, the biggest victim, still refuses to acknowledge that it had been scammed. It keeps harping on the fact that “experts” originally said two doses of vaccines were needed, but they later determined that one was enough. This still does not explain why, out of a population of 65 million, only 5 million vaccine doses were taken up.

The truth of the matter is that ordinary citizens realised that the flu vaccine is unsafe, ineffective and not necessary. Despite the low vaccination rate in France, latest reports say that H1n1 flu cases as well as H1n1 deaths in France have been on the decline!

Ordinary citizens have been able to see the H1N1 scam for what it is – an attempt by pharmaceutical companies to boost revenue by using scare tactics. Yet presidents, prime ministers, health ministers and other government officials, as well as top World Health Organisation officials – the people who are supposed to be the top brains – have fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

This is particularly disappointing in a country like Singapore, where government ministers praise themselves as being “world-class” and pay themselves obscene salaries equivalent to the combined salaries of their counterparts in about seven of the world’s leading industrialised nations. They, too, have fallen for the scam.

One exception is Poland’s Health Minister Eva Kopacz, who has shown both courage and wisdom in rejecting the H1N1 vaccine for the Polish people. Three cheers to her!

by Richard Seah

A new study published by the British Medical Journal (on 8 December 2009) has cast more doubts on the effectiveness of the flu drug, Tamiflu, as well as on its manufacturer, Roche Pharmaceuticals.

The study, led by Professor Chris del Mar of the Cochrane Collaboration, found no evidence that Tamiflu prevents serious complications, hospitalization, or death in people that have the flu. It further suggests that Roche, the Swiss company that manufactures and markets Tamiflu, may have misled governments and physicians by withholding vital information through not publishing critical studies that showed the drug to be ineffective.

But Roche maintains that it “has never concealed (or had the intention to conceal) any pertinent data.” And the company now says it will publish all the study data on a password-restricted website.

The latest findings come from a re-evaluation of an earlier 2006 study by Cochrane, which is a highly respected not-for-profit organisation that evaluates the effectiveness of various treatments. In that earlier study, Cochrane Collaboration generally agreed with claims by Roche that Tamiflu reduces:

• hospital admissions by 61%
• complications as bronchitis, pneumonia, and sinusitis by 67%
• and lower respiratory tract infections requiring antibiotics by 55%.

That 2006 Cochrane review was based largely on a paper that looked at 10 studies, all of them funded by Roche. But following concerns expressed by a Japanese doctor about the lack of medical evidence on Tamiflu’s effectiveness, the Cochrane team decided to re-examine the earlier study. In doing so, they found that only two of the 10 studies had ever been published in medical journals. Those two studies showed the drug had very little effect on complications compared to a placebo.

Meanwhile, attempts to trace the data from the remaining eight studies were not entirely successful. Said Prof Chris del Mar:

“The most important finding we found, which is a change from the previous review, was that we didn’t have enough data to know whether it reduces the complications of influenza.

There was a study written by professor Laurent Kaiser from Geneva in Switzerland, which was a summary of about 10 different trials that had been conducted by Roche Pharmaceuticals. When we actually put the data together and analysed them, we found that we couldn’t draw the conclusions that [professor] Kaiser had drawn. And so we felt very insecure about that. In fact we didn’t think it was proper to use those data.

“When we wrote to [professor] Kaiser and said ‘can you give us these data because we need to sort it all out properly’, he wrote back and said, ‘I’m very sorry I don’t have the data’. That’s a very weird thing to say. And he referred us to Roche. He said, ‘You’ll have to go and talk to the pharmaceutical company that funded it’.”

According to Professor Del Mar, Roche never gave out the data that the research team requested, but only some tables of data that were not what they needed.

Cochrane said Roche offered the data “under conditions we thought unacceptable, and what was offered to us was insufficient to analyze properly.” So now, Roche is accusing the Cochrane researchers of conducting an incomplete review, because those eight studies had been left out.

Prf Chris del Mar added:

“I can only speculate. It would be pure guesswork. But I do know that this is a drug which has made a lot of money based on the conclusions drawn from this and maybe they’re not keen for other scientists to scrutinise it in the way that the Cochrane Collaboration does.

“I do think that we need the data before we can draw conclusions and that’s why we’ve had to withdraw that conclusion that we had previously made. It’s something that makes me feel that we were rather naive as an organisation. I think this does call into question a lot of things about scientific debate and I am worried about it.”

Adding to the suspicion, two former employees of a large communications company, Adis International, have come forward with documents showing they had ghostwritten some of the published studies of Tamiflu. One of the ghostwriters revealed:

“The Tamiflu accounts had a list of key messages that you had to get in. It was run by the [Roche] marketing department and you were answerable to them. In the introduction . . . I had to say what a big problem influenza is. I’d also have to come to the conclusion that Tamiflu was the answer.”

All in, the latest Cochrane study evaluated 20 published trials. It concluded that drugs like Tamiflu are, at best, are modestly effective against flu symptoms in otherwise healthy adults and that there is a “paucity of good data” to support claims that such drugs can prevent complications from flu.