Roche just announced they are sub-licensing Tamiflu broadly. WSJ picked up the story (subscription required) and noted that some countries aren’t waiting and have allowed generic production infringing Roche’s patents.

I was able to obtain some more Tamiflu today here in Austin at my local People’s Pharmacy. While there is apparently tremendous pressure on Roche at the international level, it looks like the rest of the supply chain has not yet picked up on the coming shortage and telegraphed the price rise. Gas prices these are not.

With no human to human transmission yet, it is hard to produce a vaccine because we do not know what the final pathogen will look like as it has not mutated yet. The risk is that it will spread quickly, but another risk is that it will not spread at all unfairly delegitimizing everyone who raised the warning.

It’s a lot to ask people to st0ckpile their own Tamiflu (40 doses is about $300 enough for two acute courses if you show symptoms or 40 days worth of deterrence). But it lasts for three flu seasons. Spending $100/person per year would be $30 billion/year. Roche might part with a license to sell at a few cents a pill in those volumes and the post office distribute it getting the price down to a few bucks a person a year.

But who will st0ckpile it for you if you don’t do it yourself? All it takes is 1% of families to buy to make personal st0ckpiling bigger than Roche’s US sales in a single flu season. There were only 13,000 prescriptions last year. So if 1% of families bought demand would be increased by a factor of a hundred. Then maybe the wheels of government would move to build some more “push packs” for flu and not just bioterror.

While we are talking good public health policy, maybe we could use Tamiflu prophylactically every year in hard hit regions and not wait for bird flu. This and other measures like more widespread vaccination outreach may even cut the tens of thousands of deaths from regular flu seasons down to the 160 of a typical hurricane season. It would also give the Center for Disease Control good practice.

Charles Krathammer noted today in Washington Post that any terrorist can now obtain a digital copy (electronic or DNA) of the Spanish flu that killed tens of millions in 1918-1919. The powers that be felt that the study opportunities given its similarity to avian flu outweighed the risks. The evolving flu pandemic may provide a stark test of my (Sam not Rand) hypothesis that democratic capitalism protects itself.

I joined Bill Joy in raising an alarm about the publishing of the human genome back in 2000 in my own little way contributing my own Op-Ed piece (not accepted). I have since changed my view. Simon’s The Ultimate Resoure 2 changed my view. When we have a bad actor like a terrorist who wants to kill millions, there are trillions of dollars mobilized to combat it when the threat becomes imminent.

That is, if bird flu broke out, there would be massive quarantines, crash vaccine and anti-viral drug production programs, virus safety instructions, massive scientific study and so on. The people in harm’s way will pay thousands each to buy black market antivirals, head for the hills, or whatever course of action is open to them.

Capitalism is kind of like if you need a taxi ride to the hospital to save your life you start waving hundred dollar bills to attract a cab. Democracy means we have a government that can field an army if capitalism falters due to breakdown of property rights and rule of law.

You can improve your chances and possibly capitalism’s chances if you do the following. Ask your doctor to prescribe a 42-day prophylactic course of Tamiflu. Don’t start taking the prophylaxis course until bird flu is sighted in your area. Tamiflu also can be used for 5 days (at twice the dosage) for acute treatment if you start to show symptoms. Track avian flu’s spread from chicken to Turkey at the World Health Organization.

There won’t be enough Tamiflu if bird flu is a big hit. Unless the price starts to rise now. Unless capitalism’s wheels start to turn to produce a lot of it. Unless democracy steps in and does mandatory licensing so every pharmaceuticals manufacturer can produce tamiflu.

“The flu virus, properly evolved, is potentially a destroyer of civilizations,” depending on how resiliant they are.

Continue reading Spanish Flu Published →

OK, they pulled the game out in East Lansing, winning in OT. They did better than I thought they would, but there’s still a Jekyll/Hyde quality to the offense. But having gotten past the Spartan hurdle, they’ll probably have a winning season now. They could even still win the Big Ten, but it still seems unlikely to me.

When I read this story about a woman apparently killed on her motorcycle up in Sonoma County on the coast highway, I wondered how it happened, and if she might be alive today had she known about this.

Of course, she may also have been a good rider, and just encountered oncoming traffic in her lane, or a slick spot in the road. We may never know.

The man who played “Butch” has died.

I was never a big “Little Rascals” fan, but on a personal note, I was serving on jury duty in LA about fifteen years ago, and I got called to a panel in which he was a civil litigant (plaintiff, I think), and we were asked a number of questions about if we’d seen the series, and recognized the characters, and so on, to determine if any of us would be biased against someone who played a famous bully. We ended up getting dismissed before trial, I think because they decided to settle once they saw that there was a jury, and that this was really going to happen (which is one of the purposes of empaneling a jury).

Sadly, the Wolverines are performing about as I predicted after the Notre Dame game. I expect the Spartans to mop up the field with them next week.

This will be a long season.

[Update at 8:43 AM EDT]

Speaking of Big Ten football, David “Pretty-in-Pink” Burge writes about locker-room psyops in Iowa City. Even without these kinds of evil tricks, though, I expect the Hawkeyes to beat Michigan next month. In fact, looking at the Wolverine schedule, I could easily see them losing six games this season.

Some people are making too big a deal of the fact that Rita has dropped from a Cat 5 to a Cat 4. It’s still going to be very bad, even assuming it doesn’t restrengthen.

Some people are making too big a deal of the fact that Rita has dropped from a Cat 5 to a Cat 4. It’s still going to be very bad, even assuming it doesn’t restrengthen.

Some people are making too big a deal of the fact that Rita has dropped from a Cat 5 to a Cat 4. It’s still going to be very bad, even assuming it doesn’t restrengthen.

Rita was a late bloomer (staying a tropical storm long after predictions of becoming a hurricane Real Soon Now), but once she got into the Florida straights and out into the Gulf, she heated up in a hurry. She’s now a Cat 5, with winds in excess of 165 mph. Look out, Houston.