We've heard some very interesting news recently that countries are stocking up on a bird flu vaccine. And yet the very newspapers in which we see these headlines say the vaccine is currently being beta-tested on small groups of people. I'm curious how countries are stocking up on a vaccine that hasn't even gone through testing yet. Clearly this vaccine isn't in production. How can countries be stockpiling the vaccine if it isn't being produced?
While I think these stockpile rumors are simply state lies intended to calm people down, I know that some countries actually are stocking up on Tamiflu, which is an antiviral prescription drug. But Tamiflu will be all but useless if an outbreak occurs. Not because it doesn't work – it actually does have antiviral properties – but because you have to take a Tamiflu pill every day. Thus, if you have 100,000 pills you can really only treat 1,000 people for 100 days. Clearly you would need hundreds of millions of these pills if you were planning on treating the entire U.S. population in some kind of avian bird flu outbreak. Also, Tamiflu isn't necessarily effective against the H5N1 bird flu virus. It wasn't designed for that. It's been around for a long time as a basic antiviral drug, but in my research I've found that there are many other antiviral herbs and substances that are far more powerful than Tamiflu, that don't require a prescription and are much more affordable.
My impression of the statements from governments around the world on bird flu is that they are basically designed to calm people down and are largely false statements. I fail to see how any country can be stocking up on a vaccine that doesn't even exist. And those who say they're stockpiling Tamiflu can't possibly have enough Tamiflu to treat any reasonable percentage of the population for very long. They would run out in less than a month, leaving everybody on their own. So, as usual, when it comes to your health, you can forget getting any good information from public sources.
