Dr Sebastian Rushworth has written today about the serious problem of the underestimation of side-effects in drug trials, which he says should “shake the very foundations of evidence based medicine”.
His article reports on the results of a study recently published in the Lancet Healthy Longevity, funded by the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, which seeks to establish the extent to which drug trials underestimate side-effects by comparing trial data to real world data. The study focuses in particular on blood pressure drugs known as RAAS blockers, which Dr Rushworth explains were chosen because of the number of trials that have been done by different companies. There is no reason the results should not apply equally to other drugs, he says, including Covid vaccines (for which there have been an unprecedented number of adverse event reports despite the trials showing them to be safe).
The results are shocking. The difference was not marginal but out by a factor of three or four.
The real world patients were between 300% and 400% more likely to experience a serious event than the participants in the trials! That is in spite of the fact that the trials, as mentioned above, were using a broader definition of what constituted a serious event. If the trials were representative of reality, then they should have a higher rate of events than is seen in the real world data. Instead they have a rate that is several times lower!
The difference was just as large in trials specifically involving older people, so age differences can’t be the full explanation, he says (though he allows part of it may be that participants in the trials of older people may be healthier and younger than real world patients).
His main explanation, however, is darker. Are the drug companies simply under-reporting adverse events, both in the drug and placebo treatment groups?
The easiest solution, if you want to avoid finding nasty side effects, is to not report them, regardless of which treatment group the participant is in. That will cut down on total adverse events in both groups, which will make any difference between the groups that does exist smaller in absolute terms, and also less likely to reach the level of statistical significance. Voila – the treatment group and the placebo group end up having similar rates of side effects, and the drug company can conclude that the drug is completely safe.
Is that what’s happened here? Are the pharmaceutical companies hiding adverse events? Well, it’s very strange that the real world data shows a rate of serious adverse events that is several times higher than is found in the trials. It’s hard to see how that massive difference could be explained in any other way.
This is a huge problem, he argues, which calls into question the reliability of drug trials for telling us how safe drugs really are.
If the drug trials and the real world data show such wildly different rates of adverse events, then it really begs the question how much we can trust the trials at all. It would be perfectly reasonable in this situation to say that all “evidence” produced by pharmaceutical companies is so suspect that it should be dismissed out of hand, and that only independently funded trials should be used as a basis for medical treatment decisions.
Combined with the routine exclusion of high risk groups from trials, who are both more likely to suffer adverse effects and less likely to get the full benefit, we need to ask how much we really know about the risks and benefits of the drugs and vaccines that we give to people every day.
But what alternative is there, asks Dr Rushworth, when without drugs companies funding trials far fewer would be done at all?
Worth reading in full.
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I’d feel more sympathy towards Rose West and Howard Shipman if they got tearful. Pathetic acting by an appalling human being.
hey ho the witch is dead.
Human being: are you sure?
There’s a certain vacuity that has come over Scottish people in recent years I notice it with the younger folk especially. I think the Scots have a highly tuned built in sense of good and evil and given the state of things the Scottish spirit is still processing them. A couple of hundred years ago Samuel Johnson undertook a journey to Scotland and the western isles. It is well worth reading. Even in that day he talked about the melancholy nature of Scottish consciousness. How the people and the buildings all said that our best is behind us and we now lie in ruin.
Isn’t that why the unicorn, national animal of Scotland, is chained on the UK coat of arms? The spirit has been tamed.
Yes but I mean that in recent times there is another taming which has more to do with loss of mooring tham imperialism. And the mooring has been neurotic for a long time.
Maybe my Scottish genes are awry. Maybe I’m hopelessly wrong to think that Sturgeon was lying through her teeth when she said that the toxic Covid vaccines were safe and effective, just as she lied about unilateral Net Zero which will actually wreck the economy to no useful purpose. I could go on …
No not awry just succinctly accurate imho
Melancholy? ——-No wonder we all sound like Andy Murray. We get about 3 months of summer but the only difference between summer and winter is that it isn’t quite so cold in the summer.
“unapologetic apology and a baffling word salad” or as the Guardian comments:
“There were lawyerly attempts to turn language to her advantage: rather than ‘deleting’ messages, she argued that she ‘did not retain’ them.”
Engaging in word games to build a new reality – ideal candidate for the Covid inquiry legal team.
Echoes of Bill Clinton’s tortured parsing of single syllable verbs. “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”. With none of his greasy charm.
Engaging in word games to build a new reality
Spot on. We can add most of ‘science’ like climate change and the ridiculous theory of relativity and the big banging. Dare I add at the risk of being urinated upon, the word salads of ‘evolution’ and absolutely nothing to you.
It saddens me because I lived in Northern Ireland for many years and I saw the Belfast Proddies as the unreconstructed Scots. And they had a certain energy. The whole place is beautiful. Northern Ireland is Europe’s best kept secret. And there’s a certain energy when you meet people there which has long vanished from England I mean just the electricity of the conversation. Maybe the Scots should take a pilgrimage to Belfast and rediscover themselves. The Giant’s Causeway, the Mountains of Mourne, I could go on all day. There is a strange and beautiful pink light that pervades the beaches and skies in Carlingford Lough in the warmer months that I have never seen elsewhere.
Well it won’t be like that for much longer. Sinn Fein who murdered and maimed to advance their United Ireland agenda are now in charge, and the border which isn’t a border is perpetually open to the New Irish of hundreds of thousands of immigrants sponsored by the EU, breeding their way to their demographic destiny of political and physical superiority. Hopefully they will deal with their more southerly hosts before heading north.
Censorship Toby? Seriously?
As grotesqueries go she is in a class with the likes of Bliar and Bozo. Utterly bereft of humanity.
May I add humility and ability …?
You know now, you got wise to her antics and her kind so you have no excuse the next time around. Should’ve been obvious a long time ago perhaps she exerts an influence on Scots consciousness that I just can’t see. For me she looked like a fraud from the start just like the rest of our political class. Just tune into your better instincts and you will see a fraud right away.
Don’t make it an Elena Ceausesco moment or even Imelda Marcos and her five hundred pairs of shoes. You were duped and stupid and for me if I am a prat then I deserve to be duped. You were duped once. Like they say fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. You need to identify what is missing in order to understand why such monsters rise to the fore. Because just getting rid of her isn’t going to make much difference on its own.
There was no pandemic
The whole thing was one enormous lie – surely the biggest and most egregious in human history
The deceit of central banking and illusion of political choice ultimately helped spawn this lie. They are more established and must be on at least the same scale.
It wasn’t a pandemic it was the efficient spread of a poison. I know it is real because I experienced it I had 2 erstwhile teeth fall out in a few hours and a pain in my mouth like nothing before, way worse than toothache. The soft palate was attacked which is very similar to heart tissue. If you want to be a man about it then you look at everything. It is real and it is basically a biological weapon aimed at us,
Scottish are supposed to be canny about money. So if you are then don’t be naive about corruption. What is the point of being a good manager of your own wallet when you let yourself be fleeced by some outside force. I am just trying to lay it out straight,
It is completely different in different parts of Scotland. I have friends in Aberdeen and they sound like metrosexual nancyboys. Glaswegains are different I prefer that in terms of the people around me given what is required in terms of survival.The point is that deep down can you really find something that Scottish people care about?
I remember reading a story about some murderer or predator of young children on the loose in Glasgow. And the parents didn’t get fearful and pull their kids inside, Instead they armed their primary school children with kitchen knives and said go out and hunt him down. This is what we need.
I knew she was a wrong un the moment I saw her.
Going by the picture they look very much like Midazolam Matt-type ”tears” to me. Yes, we remember that particular clip very well….
Off topic but I know huxtable and others have been on about military-aged young men arriving at our borders in their droves for yonks now, and what on earth could the plan be for them? Some sort of fighting force in the pipeline? Well it looks like the U.S may be going the same way as the Germans, so these men may indeed be planned to form a fighting force, just maybe not in the way some may have envisioned. I think what they’re proposing here is naive in the extreme. Can you see this idea being taken on by other countries? If anywhere is going to trial it first my money’s on Germany, especially now they’re expediting citizenships for immigrants;
”Here We Go, Turning The Invasion Of Illegal Immigrants Into Citizens By Joining The Military
Conspiracy Theorists Were Right Again
What could go wrong?”
“Bill says that if you’re an undocumented person in this country and you can pass the physical and the required test, background test, the like. You can serve in our military. And if you do it honorably, we will make you citizens of the United States. Do we need that? You know what the recruiting numbers are at the army and the navy and the air force.
They can’t reach their quotas each month. They can’t find enough people to join our military forces. And there are those who are undocumented who want the chance to serve and risk their lives for this country. Could we give them a chance? I think we should.”
https://twitter.com/WallStreetApes/status/1752189591954829696
The German article on the same topic, I shared the other day. I can see this happening in reality now though. Train them up to be soldiers, serve their time in the army, get granted a fast-track citizenship, then you’ve got to just hope they’re not of the Islamic extremist persuasion once they hit civvy street.
https://rmx.news/defense/germany-mulls-accepting-foreign-nationals-into-the-army/
Honestly it is bullcrap. Give me a dozen Scottish ne’r do wells and we would conquer the world I see that all the time. Same as with English chavs. In America the chavs would be billionaires. We are reaching that point. I have more of an affinity with the Scots and the Irish because of their idealism. I can set either population alight. Like Ignatius Loyola said, go and set the world on fire.The whole status quo is about to go up. I really wish I could bestow the vital energy on the Scots.
We will look after each other and we will maintain our integrity as a country despite the perfidy and corruption. These are the darkest of days just keep the flame alive and we will arrive at a better place.
We can all start by getting the squirming parasite SNP —–OUT. —-Bury them 10 feet under never to reappear.
The point about Spain not approving an independent Scotland joining the EU is particularly revealing. The whole, bonkers, independence plan rests on Scotland joining the EU, even though this would almost certainly mean a hard border with England whatever the SNP claim to the contrary. Spain opposing Scotland joining the EU has nothing to do with whatever happened during covid, they’re highly likely to oppose a newly independent country joining the EU to deter the Catalans from seeking independence. Obviously the SNP haven’t taken this into consideration in their half baked delusions of what the future may hold for an independent Scotland.
She lied through her teeth; used Covid to leverage “difference” from England and went full tyrant, very much like Trudeau.
However, since the Official Inquiry has been set up to exonerate all the Guilty Men and Women, her crocodile tears and excuses will be accepted in full.
So will she go to jail? or will she walk away a free person, if she does go to prison my guess it will be for no more than 5 years. What about the British cabinet? Johnson and his team, the scientific advisors, the SAGE and psyops people? Again all get to walk free.Millions of lives locked up, mental health in tatters, economy ruined, deaths and injuries from forced experimental drugs. Why do these people not receive the same justice that was metred out to those at Nuremberg? Instead they get to carry on with their lives, careers, climbing the ladder on the corpses of those lives they chose to ruin,
The best governments are ones who govern the least. But what we have now are groups of politicians playing political poker with each other. ——-“I will spend 2 billion stopping the boats” ——“I will see your 2 billion and raise you another 3 billion on the boats and 28 billion saving the planet” —–“I will see your 28 billion saving the planet and raise you another 50 billion giving African children pencils” ——-“I will give them pencils and jotters and some bottles of water” ——–“I will provide pencil cases and equal rights for gay whales in Chad” ———-No wonder we are in a right old hole and digging deeper and deeper trying to get out.
ha ha ha ah jeez. ———Aw the poor wee communist lassie. ——-Communism always crumbles. When will they ever learn?
Nearest lamppost.