Risk vs Benefit
I'd like to provide the readers of this board a little insight into how the FDA approves drugs, and how doctors choose whether or not to use them. The basic equation is Risk vs Benefit. This is true of ALL drugs, yes even the ones you buy over the counter that are in your medicine cabinet right now.
Take Tylenol...it can kill, it has killed. Anaphylaxis, a life threatening allergic reaction, can occur with any drug. Used incorrectly any drug can kill. Suicide by Tylenol is a thing - take enough and you die of liver failure in a matter of days. NO DRUG IS ENTIRELY SAFE.
So if no drug is entirely safe, why do we have drugs? The answer is obvious...because they help more people than they harm. The more people they help and the less they harm the more likely a drug is to be approved and used. Sure there are other factors such as cost and whether or not there are other perhaps better and/or safer therapies on the market already.
Terri Hallihan stated in several posts that HER2 vaccine kills patients and in response to my question about a reference to such he points to Herceptin. Sure, there have been deaths with Herceptin, but OVERALL it helps many, many more patients than it harms. So it gets approved and used. Warnings are issued and patients are informed of the risks.
But importantly, the side effects of one drug with a certain mechanism of action does not and never will mean that another drug with an entirely different mechanism of action will have the same side effect profile. Also importantly is the fact that different drugs with the same mechanism of action will have different side effect profiles. And Herceptin and they way Advaxis's HER2 vaccine work have entirely different mechanisms of action. Just because Herceptin causes some morbidity and mortality does not mean that the HER2 construct that Advaxis is selling or licensing will. The side effect profile will be very, very different. Only testing will tell. Testing that hasn't been done yet. But in reading his post you may easily believe that it will. Terri Hallihan is dead wrong about this.
Stay informed, my friends, and educate yourselves.
