Tamiflu: we woz done

Let me take you back to the swine flu "epidemic" of 2010. One of the first blogs I wrote in January 2010 was entitled "The little epidemic that wasn't". I was referring to the fact that despite the fact that the drug companies had lobbied WHO so effectively that it labelled it a global "pandemic", the virus responsible for swine flu was in fact relatively innocuous and caused a disease that, in most cases, was little worse than a heavy cold. Sure it killed some, the very young and frail, the elderly and those with pre-existing severe disease, but colds can do that too, and every winter deaths result from minor infections.


The labour government of the day, terrified of being labelled slow off the mark, launched tamiflu on a fearful public and asked us, the GPs, to prescribe it by the million. Very quickly we became aware that there was a high incidence of quite significant side effects resulting from its use, including vomiting and diarrhoea; in other words it often caused symptoms worse than the flu itself. Equally quickly it became apparent that its positive effects were little more than the far safer alternative, paracetamol. In our practice we were on the case relatively quickly and I personally only prescribed it three times, usually on the obdurate insistence of the patients themselves. Since then we haven't seen a major flu outbreak, thank God, and with the publication of the latest research, which confirms what we believed four years ago, we can only hope that the medical profession, and the general public eschew this useless drug which was foisted on us by drug companies (Roche holds the patent on Tamiflu) anxious to boost their profits into the billions.


Let's make no mistake about this. The government of the day was conned by the drug manufacturers, and the con was passed on to us, the people. Let's not make the same mistake again!