Sometimes…

Something happens that proves that we were right all along. So it is with Liam Donaldson’s flu pandemics. What flu pandemics, you might ask,. Well, indeed, the ones that never happened, the ones that many of us expected to not happen, but Donaldson encourages the government to waste millions of pounds preparing anyway.

Now, finally, the penny has dropped.

Hundreds of millions of pounds may have been wasted on a drug for flu that works no 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,

The Cochrane Collaboration claimed the drug did not prevent the spread of flu or reduce dangerous complications, and only slightly helped symptoms.

None of this should come as any surprise. Only a few who are vulnerable really need specialist treatment – or even vaccination, although for flu that’s a bit hit and miss anyway given that the virus mutates so rapidly. Far better to let us stay at home and self-medicate if we get it, which is what I have done when I had it in the past – and, yes, I can tell the difference between a couple of weeks laid out with flu and forty eight hours of discomfort caused by a head cold.

The manufacturers Roche and other experts say the analysis is flawed.

Well, they would, wouldn’t they? As do the other people for whom the longed-for pandemic means they will still be crying “wolf” next winter. Tamiflu makes a mild difference with seasonal flu – this, apparently makes is some sort of super drug during a pandemic according to these shroud wavers. Yeah, beats me, too.

Perhaps we, the taxpayers, should be knocking on Donaldson’s door demanding our money back?

4 Comments

  1. I suggest that this particular example of government waste is an insignificant drop in the ocean. How much do you suppose will have been wasted by the time that the truth finally dawns that thermageddon isn’t going to happen?

  2. I never had flu in my life.

    THEN, in the army, we were asked to “volunteer” for flu jabs.

    I had it three times that year. (Flu I mean.)

    NEVER again!

    P.S, I am a copper, I do NOT believe in “coincidence,” but “coinicidentaly, that was also the first year I had a gout attack! (HEJ! That kind of “science” works for the anti smokers, why not for my gout?)

  3. Being old enough, I remember the discovery of AIDS in the early 1980’s.

    Whilst not wishing to trivialise what is after all, an extremely unpleasant condition, I seem to recall the medical establishment & scientists forecasting armageddon, the end of the world and corpses piled 125 deep in the streets by the turn of the century.

    Still, it got them their research grants, I suppose…

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