A pharmaceutical company in the USA is selling a drug that costs $158,000 per treatment per person and was approved by the FDA although it states on the FDA website the drug can cause fatalities. (FDA PDF Below). It has been used in the UK since 2016.
Lemtrada Targets MS-related Cells
Lemtrada, which is also known as alemtuzumab, was originally approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, under the brand name Campath, to treat B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The drug is a humanized monoclonal antibody that seeks out and destroys specific immune cells that carry a protein called CD52. Many of these cells are believed to be the white blood cells that attack the central nervous system in people with MS. When those cells are destroyed, the body manufactures new white blood cells that have different properties, i.e., beneficial helper cells rather than the destructive cells that are programmed to attack myelin. Thus, the similarity to stem cell replacement therapy. That therapy uses chemotherapy to destroy most of the body’s immune system cells. Then, fresh stem cells are infused into the body which, over time, create new white blood cells. Unlike other disease-modifying therapies (DMTs), which require injections every few days or monthly infusions, patients receiving Lemtrada are treated once a year, for two years. In the first year, the drug is infused daily for five days in a row, on an outpatient basis. Each infusion takes about four hours and the patient is watched for another two hours afterward. A year later that process is repeated, but for only three days. And that’s it.
Neurologist Power of Persuasion.
A new database reveals that individual medics are receiving tens of thousands of pounds in consultancy fees from the pharmaceutical industry while recommending products to patients.
Some NHS officials involved in assessing which drugs should be prescribed to patients, such as the neurologist have been earning up to £20,000 per patient from directly marketing their products to the health service. However, tens of millions of pounds worth of payments have been paid to doctors and officials and were not individually declared because the recipients refused to be named (I wonder why?). This proves what I originally suspected that even though the Neurologist mentioned some risks he said in his time prescribing the drug he never heard of any fatalities. In other words money talks…..
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/search/search?search_api_views_fulltext=lemtrad
However earlier this year the European Medicine Agency restricted the use of the drug to “new patients” in the UK and stated that the drug can cause serious life-threatening illnesses the drug is under investigation in which all investigations will be completed by October of this year. What the European Medicine Agency failed to say is that there have been numerous fatalities.
Patients already on the treatment are asked to continue with the treatment and if they have any concerns they need to speak with their doctor.
Now here is the scenario the NHS has bought this drug and they would obviously want their money back if the drug is deemed to be unsafe, but that is never going to happen as the government would be out of pocket. According to the (EMA) European Medicine Agency patients who benefit from the drug can use it. In other words “we will see what happens”…
Am I missing something here if a drug is unsafe to use do not allow patients to continue using it. From citations from https://multiplesclerosisnewstoday.com/news-posts/2019/08/26/link-between-lemtrada-and-mortality-more-common-than-previously-reported-study-finds/ Nine fatality cases were deemed probably caused by Lemtrada, with six of these patients dying within one month after receiving just one treatment infusion, https://bmcresnotes.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13104-019-4507-6, In my opinion, one fatality is one too many…….
So here is the other scenario I know about this drug my 18-year-old daughter was about to start her second treatment this year in August, precisely one year after her first treatment.
I was told by the ‘European Medicine Agency’ if they suspect the drug is unsafe to restrict it to all patients but I can see the red tape and they have come back to me saying that I should talk to my daughter’s doctor. I explained if a manufacturer of a car, for example, had a fault, the cars would be recalled and the manufacturer would not risk a lawsuit, but the ‘EMA and the Drug Company Sanofi & the NHS think they can go unchallenged if something was to go wrong. EMA responded that all drugs including Ibuprofen and Asprin have an element of risk. But none actually state anything about fatalities. I was told by the EMA if there was a drug that could prolong your life for another ten years if I had cancer, knowing after the ten years I may get another form of cancer would I take it? Obviously, I am not speaking for everyone but I would look for alternative medicine and look into stem cell technology, I would not take something that was dangerous and could cause fatalities.
I wrote to the FDA and they did not reply but the pharmaceutical company did and so did the ‘EMA’. I said to both organizations you cannot use people like ‘lab rats’ without their knowledge and they both did not comment on this and said if I had any concerns I should speak with the consultant/neurologist, so I hit a brick wall with my questions.
The hospital also has not said to my daughter the drug has been restricted. When I challenged the sister on duty at the time of my daughter’s second infusion, the sister said the drug had been restricted because it was too expensive for the NHS (she blatantly lied to me), I then asked a nurse and she said she did not know it was restricted.
So this tells me the staff in the hospitals have been pre-warned that if anyone was to ask is to just act dumb, after all they would not want a moral panic. (A moral panic meaning – A moral panic is a feeling of fear spread among many people that some evil threatens the well-being of society).
The drug can cause, thyroid, liver, kidney disease, cancer, or death.
Moving on my daughter for the next five years religiously has to have her blood and urine tested each month. What is the NHS going to do if she contracts another illness because of the drug…….no doubt put a plaster on it and come up with some lame excuse. She is also assigned a Nurse from the MS Team and for any concerns she has to ring the helpline.
So last Friday my daughter phones the MS team on 11/10/19 as she knows for a fact her immune system has been shut down from the drug to ask if she is ok to be amongst people who may have scarlet fever. She happens to be in college studying her ‘Health & Social Course’ and one of her classmates has ‘Scarlet Fever.
When she was connected to an operator she was told they are not qualified to give advice and that she has to phone another number, which again she ended up out of frustration after the 4th attempt to contact the Neurologist’s Secretary who told her to go back and phone the MS Team. So we were four days into my daughter phoning for advice and no one from the MS Team, my daughter phoned Friday 11th October 2019 and no one has bothered to phone her back.
My daughter then said she experienced a sharp shooting pain across her chest and down her left arm over the weekend and thought she was relapsing. My thoughts were she was having a side effect from the drug and having pains across her chest and down her left arm is not a good sign, especially at the tender age of 18 is very concerning.
I did try and contact the media over this in July of this year and the well know national newspaper journalist said how come it has not been in the news?, well unless someone does a hoo-ha and starts behaving like a raving looney banshee, no one is going to take any notice, so that is why I have started putting the wheels in motion. The media are not going to publish something that can cause a major uproar throughout society. People will lose faith in the healthcare system and people will look for alternative medicines which will then cause adverse effects to the economy.
This is all smoke and mirrors in order to cover up the seriousness of dangerous drugs that are put on the market and not publicized as dangerous and the greedy pharma companies do not care who it affects as long as it makes them money.
It’s a vicious circle with the government funding the pharmaceutical companies that charge the hospitals atrocious amounts of money for drugs that are not safe to use on humans and for every person that is prescribed the drug, the consultant gets paid the pharmaceutical company gets paid and so does the government. It’s a win-win situation at the expense of the people.
#lemtrada #alemtuzumab #sanofi #sanofigenzymes #sanofigenzymedeaths #multiplesclerosis #ms #neurologycardiff #nhs #neurologyheathhospital
