[Alex3917]

The problem is that:

- The safety standards for getting new drugs approved are incredibly lax. All you need to show is that it helps the person in some measurable way for the first six weeks. You don't need to show that the drug is safe or effective for longterm use, even if the drug is designed for longterm use. And you don't need to show that the person's overall health and wellbeing is improved, just the one condition the drug is designed to treat. So if an acne drug causes liver failure it will still get approved as long as it's effective at treating acne.

- The government has been caught many times injecting political dissidents and others with fake vaccines, most recently in the case of the Bin Laden family.

- Most academics believe that the US government was responsible for starting the AIDS epidemic by running vaccination programs in Africa. [1] [2]

- The government has repeatedly shown that they don't take evidence of safety and quality problems seriously at best, and actively prosecute whistleblowers at worst.

[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/health...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-River-Journey-Source-AIDS/dp/03163...

[EvilTerran]

"So if an acne drug causes liver failure it will still get approved as long as it's effective at treating acne."

Er, no.

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DevelopmentApprovalProcess/HowDrugs...

"The goals of the New Drug Application are to provide enough information to permit FDA reviewer to reach the following key decisions: * Whether the drug is safe and effective in its proposed use(s), and whether the benefits of the drug outweigh the risks."

Also http://www.fda.gov/drugs/resourcesforyou/consumers/ucm143534... : "It's the clinical trials that take so long -- usually several years". I'm afraid I can't find any actual figures for the typical length of the clinical trials at present.

...

"Most academics believe..."

Absolute rubbish.

For one thing, you've cited only one academic (as "the River" is by a journalist, not a scientist), and he attributed it to "well-meaning European doctors and nurses"... so, er, not the US, and not the government.

But, more importantly, there's plenty more academics who think that theory is completely wrong:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11405925

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11405926

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15103367

[Alex3917]

Academic is not a synonym for scientist. Historians are academics, but they're not scientists. Journalists may or may not be academics, but I think it's pretty clear that he was acting as an academic in writing that book.

[EvilTerran]

"But, more importantly, there's plenty more academics who think that theory is completely wrong: [cite] [cite] [cite]"

Hmm?

[Alex3917]

If you have access to those papers I'd be curious to check them out, just send me an email.

[EvilTerran]

Two of those pages I provided have links titled "Free PMC Article". They lead to full-text PDFs:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088471/pdf/TB0...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088472/pdf/TB0...

The other, I Googled the title -- the fourth result (after some pages on nature.com) had a PDF of that one:

http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/publications/246/

[Alex3917]

Interesting. I haven't read either of the original books so it's difficult for me to evaluate the quality of these papers. It's worth noting though that these papers are only the beginning of a long back and forth, which you can find on Hooper's website:

http://www.aidsorigins.com/content/blogcategory/29/51/

http://www.aidsorigins.com/content/blogcategory/28/50/

Also, while clinical trials usually do take 10 years or so, the actual patients don't necessarily receive the drug for more than a few weeks. The reason it takes so long is because you need to do preclinical research, secure patents, secure funding, get IRB and FDA approval for each study, design the methodology and acquire the resources you need, recruit hundreds or thousands of volunteers, wait for the drugs to get manufactured, run all the studies in each phase, analyze the data, get FDA approval to transition from phase I to phase II and from phase II to phase III, then wait for actual approval, etc.

[streptomycin]

How exactly do you propose we evaluate new drugs for long term use? Should we just do a 50 year clinical trial of every single drug before approving it?

[herbivore]

How about just not putting the drug on the market in the first place? High cholesterol? Stop eating meat and eggs and bacon with every meal. High blood pressure? Move your ass and eat your veggies. Chronic fatigue? Put that diet coke down and drink water. Joint pain? Cut the dairy out - your body is leaking calcium and you have been lied to for 60 years. Dairy is killing you. People are just dumb, that's the hard truth.

[tsotha]

>High cholesterol? Stop eating meat and eggs and bacon with every meal. High blood pressure? Move your ass and eat your veggies.

The connection between cholesterol and fat intake is tenuous at best. You're likely to be able to cut your total cholesterol levels by less than 15 points through a low fat diet plus exercise unless it was ridiculous to start with. In my family a healthy diet results in a total cholesterol level of around 250, while a strict low fat diet will bring it down to 235 or so, far above the recommended level.

As far as blood pressure is concerned, nearly everyone develops hypertension eventually.

[streptomycin]

By "the drug" you mean "all new drugs"? Because that's what I was asking about.