Sabrecat, it is easy to scare people when you have a few cases of an illness we’re not familiar with. So when we had the cases of H1N1 we lost most of the patients. The few that were saved were put on lung machines. So people panicked and Roche made billions selling Tamiflu . In the UK people were able to buy it without prescription.
Reports later showed that Tamiflu doesn’t do much. It shortens the flu symptoms by 16 hours and doesn’t prevent complications like pneumonia or hospitalizations.
Tamiflu is part of a group of anti-influenza drugs called neuraminidase inhibitors, which work by blocking a viral enzyme that helps the influenza virus to invade cells in your respiratory tract. The problem is that your nervous system also contains neuraminidase enzymes essential for proper brain functioning, and when blocked with these drugs, severe neurotoxicity may ensue (especially in the infants and children whose blood-brain barrier has not yet developed sufficiently).
The side effects included seizures, suicidal behavior, hallucinations, delirium, and other behavioral side effects (such as reports of children jumping off roofs shortly after taking the drug), which, of course, had not been reported by the drug company.
So the risk, by far outweighs the possible benefit yet the CDC put Tamiflu on the list of recommended meds and our governments wasted billions to stockpile it .
P.
