Government invested further £49m on Tamiflu despite known doubts about it

Antiviral drug Tamiflu tablets made by Roche Pharmaceuticals. Photograph: Per Lindgren/REX

The government has spent an further £49m inside of the last 12 months on renewing its stockpile of Tamiflu, the drug which independent scientists say could do nothing at all to avert a flu pandemic.

The decision to spend however more funds on a stockpile of controversial medicines that has already price above £500m “verges on the reckless, given that the proof base was presently extremely shaky”, according to Richard Bacon, Conservative MP and senior member of the public accounts committee.

The revelation of the additional spending came in the government’s response to the committee’s report in January, which recommended that no a lot more Tamiflu should be purchased till the Department of Well being had reviewed the need to have for it.

At the time, the committee was informed the division had invested £424m on Tamiflu and £136m on a equivalent, but inhaled, flu drug known as Relenza. The extra £49m will take the total invest to £609m.

On Thursday, independent scientists from the Cochrane Collaboration published an examination of all the data from the clinical trials carried out by manufacturers Roche and GlaxoSmithKline prior to licensing of the medication, which took them above four many years of negotiations to acquire.

They concluded that the medication shorten a flu bout by approximately half a day, but there is no evidence that they avoid hospitalisations or complications such as pneumonia and, when utilised to avert flu, they cause some men and women significant problems like psychiatric and kidney difficulties.

The organizations keep the drugs are risk-free and beneficial, but Bacon says the doubts about the drugs had been evident at the time of his committee’s inquiry final yr, ahead of the further £49m had been invested. A important member of the Cochrane staff gave proof. “You do not devote £400m to decrease flu signs by a day or half a day. You buy Lemsip for that. You commit millions of pounds on it to avert pandemic flu,” he advised the Guardian. “They must have held off and waited till the more analysis was available.”

In its response to the PAC report, the government explained that the 2013-14 programme to replace drug stocks going out of date with new batches was currently in location. The selection to go ahead “supports the department’s dedication to be prepared for a more serious influenza pandemic and to pay the prices agreed in the current contract.”

The government also dismissed calls by the committee for all clinical trials – past and potential – to be registered and the information from them created available for wider independent scrutiny, saying it was “not feasible” to do it retrospectively.

“What is wrong with opening it up to wider independent scrutiny?” asked Bacon. “Are we to believe the perform undertaken by regulators has some kind of magic charm about it and that there is a priestly caste referred to as government-appointed scientists who have obtainable to them insights that are not available to other individuals? Are they asking us to go back to the 13th century or the 16th century or back to alchemy? Is this what they want? That’s what it sounds like to me and I feel it is ridiculous.”

A developing variety of senior scientists feel the issue lies with the piecemeal way in which clinical trials are completed. They are not set up to reply distinct concerns that are of agreed worldwide crucial, such as, in the situation of Tamiflu, exactly what problems it can avoid and what use it would be in a pandemic.

Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and a professor of tropical medication at Oxford University, mentioned regulators, scientists, medical doctors, policymakers and other individuals concerned in drug advancement have to come together to work out what the vital queries are that require to be answered, so that when there are many trials, usually of broadly comparable medication, the benefits can be aggregated for a clear image of what works and what does not. On Tamiflu, he stated, “the trustworthy reality is we merely do not know”, because the trials have been not made to look for the appropriate solutions.

We could find out from the approaches that have been taken to ailments in poor countries, such as malaria and HIV, he stated, in which employing income and time value-efficiently to come to the right answers is vital.

Government invested further £49m on Tamiflu despite known doubts about it