Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Does the Vaccine Matter? The Atlantic

Thanks to Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer, well known health journalists, for this erudite piece on the limitations of epidemiological data for flu vaccines and antiviral drugs. They are brave women to tackle and publish this piece: kudos!

A new GAO report on FDA's reliance on surrogate endpoints (such as using antibody levels generated by a vaccine to demonstrate effectiveness, instead of measuring cases of disease prevented) provides part of the explanation for why we don't know nearly enough about the drugs and vaccines in the US pharmacopeia.

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