One hundred and seventy thousand pages of data have led researchers to one conclusion: Roche’s Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza were a waste of money.
Published in BMJ, the researchers said that while the drugs could have an impact on flu symptoms, they were worthless in terms of containing a flu pandemic, which was the key reason governments spent billions stockpiling the medications.
Bloomberg reports the US has paid $1.3 billion and the UK $710 million on medications researchers said reduced patient misery by 17 hours but “without curbing the number of hospitalizations.”
BMJ’s editor-in-chief said at a briefing that this is coming out because researchers now have access to clinical trial data they had been seeking since 2009, when the H1N1 swine flu broke and governments started ramping up their stores.
