Home
PhotographyA few rather unknown facts about the so-called pandemic:
- The superawesome treatment Tamiflu decreases the infection with the virus from 6 days to … 5 days. Wow, that is quite awesome.
- There are already strains immune to the vaccine.
- The vaccine was only tested on several thousand patients. That’s not enough for a vaccine which will be given to many hundreds of million of people (at least 30 million in Germany alone).
- Now it gets crazy – probably, because we’re going to start talking about the US: vaccine makers and federal officials will be immune from lawsuits that result from any new swine flu vaccine, under a document signed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. If problems arise, a federal court handles claims and decides who will be paid from a special fund (here is a good overview about that topic).
- And it becomes even funnier: more than half the children in England taking the swine flu drug suffer side-effects (as nausea and insomnia), N = 248. Researchers concluded that the “burden of side-effects needs to be considered” when deciding whether to treat children with preventative measures.
A very famous writer once wrote something very useful. I highly recommend people in charge to apply it to our current situation:
EDIT: just as an explanation, the current treatment I’m referring to is Tamiflu, which is given to already infected patients. The vaccine I’m talking about is currently mass-produced, and will be given to huge amounts of people as preventative treatment.
August 20th, 2009
August 20th, 2009 at 23:37
It’s not the vaccine but the medication with tamiflue that has only weak effects on the course of disease. Anyway, the H5N1 is not dangerous because you get ill for 5 or 6 days. The reason for the large scale immunization schedule is that a very similar virus killed millions of people in the past. And no one can tell that H5N1 will not mutate in a similar manner. And as Eiko pointed out, the available medicine is quite ineffective.
The first wave of the spanish flue was also very mild as the Agencia Fabra reported to Reuters in Mai 1918:
“A Strange Form Of Disease Of Epidemic Character Has Appeared In Madrid. The Epidemic Is Of A Mild Nature, No Deaths Having Been Reported”
Have a look at
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanische_Grippe
and especially at
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Spanish_flu_death_chart.png&filetimestamp=20061208164015
August 20th, 2009 at 23:45
Thanks for the correction in my first paragraph.
Of course the virus might mutate. In my opinion, 2 things will increase the chances for mutation:
* more infections (giving the possibility for more mutations), and
* more resistant (read: vaccinated) people (heightening the pressure of selection).
There were several situations in the last 50 years when pandemics where expected, and large proportions of the population received preventative treatment. In most cases, it was not only useless, but caused severe problems.
For instance, 40 million US citizicens were vaccinated in 1976 during a swine-flu epidemic. A pandemic never materialized, but thousands who got the shots filed injury claims, saying they suffered a paralyzing condition called Guillain-Barre Syndrome or other side effects.
Eventually, it’s a question about mistakes again: of course I’d rather have 5 people dying because of side effect, rather than having millions of people killed by a virus. But as scientists we should be very strict and conservative with those kinds of things.
August 21st, 2009 at 00:06
[...] Go here to see the original: swine-flu vaccine: not. [...]
August 21st, 2009 at 00:35
[...] more: swine-flu vaccine: not. Bookmark It Hide Sites $$('div.d9032').each( function(e) { [...]
August 23rd, 2009 at 21:45
I don’t see why reducing the number of possible hosts for the virus should increase the probability of a more lethal mutation. I would expect the mean number of mutations to be proportional to the number of RNA replications which again should be somewhat proportional to the number of infected persons. If a few people are immune to the virus, the number of infections is reduced in the same proportion as people are immune. If a sufficiently large number of people is immune, the number of of infections will even reduce over-proportionally since the virus can only propagate if an infected person ‘conterminates’ a non-immune person. And this gets more and more improbable with an increasing number of vaccined people. Think of crossing a river by hopping from stone to stone. If there are many stones in the river, you will always find a stone to bring you further to the other side. When the number of stones decreases, you may eventually find yourself in a dead end (for the virus, the situation is even worse: It ‘chooses’ the next stone blindly and cannot turn back to a more promising path). If the stones get to few, there will be no more paths that lead you over the river anymore (And this is the point, where a virus is extinct; this has worked for smallpox).
The short form: If enough people are vaccined, the virus may be extinct before it can become a fatal epidemic.
August 25th, 2009 at 23:21
Most probably, yes. And I very much like the metaphor you employ.
I wasn’t clear enough: a heightened selection pressure due to vaccine increases the percentage of vaccine-resistant viruses in the population, but doesn’t increase the total number of resistant viruses.
So yes, of course it’s a smart thing to treat a virus which is causing a pandemic. My major point was simply that the pharmaceutical-industries which are well-known for fraud by know (remember that they faked 4 whole issues of elsevier journals just recently) and have – due to extremely financially supported *cough* lobbyism – a lot of liberties, especially in the US, must be watched very carefully in such dire circumstances.
August 26th, 2009 at 22:53
(The vaccine was tested on “several hundred” people, and since there weren’t any major side effects the president of the Paul-Ehrlich Institute draws the conclusion that it’s probably not an issue to give it to children and pregnant women – he finds the risk “acceptable” That kind of behavior is exactly what I’m talking about — several hundred tests is not sufficient for a new vaccine that shall be given to a great proportion of the population.)
September 14th, 2009 at 14:24
People can get Tamiflu without prescription (!) online, as the consumer assistant office states. Furthermore it seems lots of fake versions of Tamiflu are sold. Money makes the world go round.