Uncle Sam's $1.3 billion paper weight
You've heard all the sickening stories before. The $200 hammers... the $700 ashtrays... a cool $350,000 a year to sponsor a NASCAR driver who has never won a race.
The way Uncle Sam throws around your cash, you ought to feel more fleeced than a herd of Scottish sheep. And it looks like he has his shears out again.
Because according to a damning new study from a leading global research collaborative, our government has just wasted BILLIONS of our dollars on the one thing they could have picked up for free at any business office in America.
Paper weights.
That's right. A massive investigation by the prestigious Cochrane Collaboration has discovered that the MILLIONS of doses of anti-flu medication our government has been stockpiling for a decade are nothing but expensive paper weights.
The new study, just published in BMJ, analyzed 46 clinical trials and found there isn't a shred of evidence supporting our government's hare-brained scheme to stockpile Tamiflu for some mythical flu apocalypse.
In fact, researchers found that flu sufferers choking down Tamiflu daily only reduced the duration of their symptoms from 7 days to 6.3 days -- a measly 16 hours! It wasn't any more effective than Tylenol.
But it was a hell of a lot more expensive. Our government has spent more than $1.3 billion stockpiling Tamiflu and other unproven antivirals -- money the Cochrane folks say has been "thrown down the drain." That's because Tamiflu isn't just a lemon a used car salesman would be embarrassed to sell -- it also has a short shelf life, and millions of doses are getting ready to expire.
That junk can't rot fast enough for me. Tamiflu has been linked to headaches, nausea and vomiting, and some say it could even make you crazier than a bag of cats. Eight flu sufferers in Japan actually committed suicide after Tamiflu reportedly unleashed a tidal wave of alleged psychotic side effects.
Well, that sickening thud you hear isn't just the sound of more Tamiflu victims jumping out windows -- it's the sound of the other shoe dropping. Just a couple weeks back, I told you about how a team of British and American scientists were cooking the books on Tamiflu research in a pathetic bid to get governments around the world to plunk down more tax dollars on new doses.
But the science doesn't lie, and these 46 studies are revealing a shocking truth you'll never hear from the lying lips of Big Pharma execs. Tamiflu is as unreliable as a 1971 Ford Pinto. It didn't make us any healthier, and it didn't ward off some influenza Armageddon.
All it did was fleece us, one dangerous dose at a time.