Member Info for Tim45

I just replied to Jeremy Hunt, copying Jon Ashworth and Greg Clark. It will achieve nothing but I felt marginally better:

Dear Mr Hunt,
Thank you for taking the trouble to respond fully my letter, including a link to the minutes of the Health & Social Care Committee meeting held on November 4th, which you chaired.

Having read the minutes in their entirety, I am dismayed to discover that not a single mention was made of the British biotech company Synairgen or of SNG001, their inhaled interferon Beta 1a treatment.

I would like to know why this treatment was not felt worthy of mention, especially since my own MP, Greg Clark, was also in that meeting. I wrote to Mr Clark in October, asking him to raise the lack of government support for this treatment so he should have been well aware of its potential.

The only way that the world will be able to supress and control COVID-19 is with both vaccines and treatments. They are NOT, as one would believe (from the stance of our own government, its chosen scientific advisors and most of the media) mutually exclusive.

I believe that your all-party committee meeting failed in its duty to properly reveal the complete picture regarding the most promising treatments for COVID-19. Specifically, I would like to see the principal witness, Professor Peter Horby, recalled to answer this question:

“Are you aware of any treatment that has the potential to halt the progress of COVID-19 and all future mutations in infected patients? A straight answer please, Professor Horby.”

Continued on next post ...

Kevin - not a single reference to interferon, Synairgen or sng001. But the time has now passed for the UK to assist them. They're on their way with the US, Activ-2 inclusion and three trials. It's just so maddening.

And this was my original letter to him:

Dear Mr Hunt,

Why has our Government not informed the public of the SNG001 home trial (https://www.covidtrialathome.com ) which could be helping to save lives now?

I have been following the progress of SNG001, a British-developed, inhaled treatment for coronavirus infection.

A Phase II trial was peer-reviewed and published in The Lancet on November 12th. The drug was shown to significantly improve patient recovery compared to a placebo group.

A larger Phase III trial is starting across UK hospitals and in 20 countries.

Please would you pressure our Government to start supporting this effective treatment and to grant emergency authorisation in our hospitals and ideally, care homes too. Their obsession seems to be only over vaccines and testing with treatment apparently being ignored or, for some reason, overlooked. Why is this?

I look forward to hearing from you,

Kind regards,

I finally received this courteous reply to my letter of November 28th. To his credit, it was longer than the typical civil servant's boilerplate; perhaps he wrote it?

Below is his reply, followed by my original letter. So much has happened since then and I will be writing back with an update. He includes the link to the minutes of his committee meeting on treatments. Peter Horby was a key witness, it's worth reading his 'evidence'. The treatments he mentions are dexamethasone, remdesivir and convalescent plasma (since shown to be of no benefit). No mention made at any time in his numerous and long-winded answers, of Synairgen, sng001 or even of interferon. It's a long read but if you tire of the inevitable slanging matches on here tonight, it illustrates just how deliberately blind a major academic sector has been, and continues to be, towards a treatment that holds so much poromise for the world. Made me angry to read it.

-----
Dear Mr XX
Thank you for your email of 28 November. I am sorry that it has taken some time to reply to you.

The rapid approval of drugs that can mitigate the most severe impacts of COVID-19 is a really important issue and I appreciate your bringing it to my attention. However, the Health and Social Care Committee is a parliamentary body with a national remit to scrutinise the spending, administration and policy of the Department of Health and Social Care and its associated bodies. It is an emanation of Parliament and is therefore distinct from Government. I am sorry to say therefore, that the Committee will not be able to make an assessment of the efficacy of SNG001 in treating COVID-19. It would not be appropriate for the Committee to express an opinion on this drug specifically unless it carried out an investigation into it and heard evidence from all sides, and I regret that the constraints of the Committee’s programme at the moment will not allow it.

However, you may be interested to know that the Committee has examined the issue of treatments for COVID-19 more generally as part of our Coronavirus: lessons learnt inquiry. This was looked at in particularly close detail in our 4 November 2020 session at:

https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/1136/default/

where the Committee took evidence from global health experts such as Professor Peter Horby on the development of treatments and therapeutics that are able to make a contribution to treat coronavirus. Professor Horby outlined in some detail the importance of robust safety and efficacy testing in the approval process. You can read the transcript of that session here.

Once again, thank you for writing to me, etc.

Thanks Chris - it must have just been a link embedded in a post here.

Dr Campbell's very useful video explanation of interferon action seems to have been removed from the Synairgen Reddit page. Or have I missed it?

Thank you so much pmjh - for your diligent, well-researched and insightful posts over the past long months. You gave this virgin investor the confidence to hold tight.

Keeping up-to-date with the posts on this prolific board (even with my 60+ green boxes) has become almost a full-time task! Your Reddit page was an inspired move, without which all those essential reports and videos would have become swamped and lost in the noise of this board. I read them all, I watched them all and, although the science is beyond me (I'm an engineer, not a scientest) the evidence was compelling and growing by the day.

And thank you too for your unshakeable good manners and a gentle, dry wit that could dispense with the idiots and the lazy in a few light-hearted jabs. Good luck to you, I do hope you'll be back.

Please, please just ignore him rather than constantly needing to respond. It achieves nothing and is clogging up the otherwise intelligent, respectful exchanges on here. Thank you.

Good point, thank you. I should keep a sense of scale and perspective! You're right - to Polar, we are small fry.

Ooops 'Polar'. Talking now about treatents ... 'Remdesivir', Regeneron, AZ with "some success". Not mentioned SNG at all in this context. "Need very targeted treatments". He needs to do some research.

Ploar just sumamrised Synairgen as being high risk ... with a very poor summary of the scope and potential of SNG001.

Doc - thanks for this. I can't imagine Synairgen risking their data integrity with such a trick. The average viewer/reader will now assume that she IS receiving the drug. But most reporting is just so lazy isn't it?
I suppose we should be thankful that the BBC news page wasn't illustrated with a little blue asthma inhaler, as one of the Phase II articles was!

Since the news report is that the first patient 'has received treatment' I really do worry that if she actually received a placebo and worsens, the Press will have been following her progress and will jump on this as a disappointment.

Is there any way that she might have definitely been given SNG001, as an exceptional 'first dose event', with this fact being declared in the trial data? I know this flies in the face of the whole point of a double-blind placebo trial but it would certainly avoid a possible PR flop if her health sadly declines.

Does anyone have expert knowledge of this?

Thank you.

Reported as 'receiving the treatment'. Let's hope she isn't receiving the placebo. 50/50.

Leicesterboy - don't you love playing with statistics to make some point?
Using your figures:
- Average age of a COVID-sufferer who dies ... 82 years
- Average age of a non-COVID person at death ... 81.5 years

Mmmm ... except the non-COVID death figure is an average of ALL AGES (0-max age) whereas the 'COVID death' average age is calculated ONLY on people who are suffering from the virus, mostly >75.

Guardian article: "The new results, which have not yet undergone peer review, ..."
Han****'s gloating is just revolting.

I cannot any longer watch Han**** talking about these awful deaths, with that smug expression, knowing what they could be doing to save many of them. It does actually feel like criminal negligence.

Your'e on the wrong board. Bye.

Thanks Gold5 - the site is at: https://email.number10.gov.uk/

Joey, Mat, Geovanni, SGD27 and nogutsnoglory - many thanks for your responses. This is what makes this board (most of the time) such a useful and supportive resource.

With all that has been published so far on SNG001 since they pulled out, AZN must surely be thinking that they have missed a golden opportunity?