Yesterday, I wrote about a stunning study showing the flu drug Tamiflu (oseltamivir) is deadly to critically ill influenza patients. I think - I hope, anyway - that big legacy media outlets will eventually have to follow the news, even if they’d rather not.
This story matters deeply because Tamiflu is not just another drug.
In the 2000s, Tamiflu was the mRNA of its time, a hyped new treatment for a public health emergency. The fact the promised flu pandemics never came to pass (Chinese labs weren’t as good back then, lol, only not really kidding) did not keep Roche, Tamiflu’s manufacturer, from selling almost $10 billion of Tamiflu from 2006 to 2009.
Then, as evidence that it was less effective and potentially risky piled up, Tamiflu turned into something else. It became powerful evidence of Big Pharma’s habit of hiding negative data — and the industry’s influence on the World Health Organization and other supposedly independent public health bureaucracies.
Yet Tamiflu remained on the market. It continued to be prescribed widely, particularly to the sickest flu patients, where it became a standard treatment. About 25 million Americans have received it in the last decade.
So last month’s study showing Tamiflu actually harms such patients falls in the category of stunning but not surprising. The fact a placebo-controlled study to test whether it helped those patients took 27 years to finish only adds to the scandal.
Most people now understand Big Pharma behaves unethically as a matter of course, while running rings around regulators and doctors trying to judge the safety and efficacy of the medicines it offers. Even so, the fact a drug as problematic as Tamiflu became a standard treatment for the sickest patients without a single randomized trial marks a new low.
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(Covering the drug industry. With help from you - NOT the drug industry.)
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The real question now is whether the legacy media will do its job.
This story is complicated and not overtly political, so it won’t necessarily push X’s buttons (though my initial post on the topic has received 1.2 million views). The Times and other legacy outlets still have the power to kill, or at least deflate, stories like this. If they won’t take up the topic, it will slowly vanish.
But why wouldn’t health reporters be interested in the story of a widely hyped respiratory virus treatment that turned out to be deadly —
Yeah, exactly.
It’s precisely because Tamiflu’s hype-to-disappointment-to-danger saga raises such obvious echoes of mRNA (and remdesivir) that legacy outlets is so wary of touching it.
Will they?
I hope so.
Either way, I can promise I won’t let it go.
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(And if you’d like to help with a one-time donation, this is the place.)
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Yesterday’s piece:
URGENT: Tamiflu kills
An influenza drug prescribed to 25 million Americans since 2014 roughly doubles the risk of death in hospitalized patients who receive it, researchers have found.
I’m old enough to remember when leftist culture despised and distrusted big pharma. They were the perfect villains, and it was often up to conservatives to defend them- “They charge so much because it took years to develop that drug!” And “Where would we be without them?”
Both good points, but oh how the worm has turned, and why exactly?
Ha ha ha, great rhetorical question: "The real question now is whether the legacy media will do its job?"