Vaccine, drug: whatever

I don’t know why I get worked up about this stuff, but there’s a boneheaded editor at the NYTimes who today decided that Tamiflu is a flu vaccine. It’s not. It’s a drug that treats the flu. There’s a world of difference. The writers of the article, Andrew Pollack and Tom Wright, got this correct, referring to Tamiflu as a drug throughout the entire piece.

Given the huge debate going on about how to improve the vaccine infrastructure to prevent a flu pandemic, a headline like this is only going to give more people a wrong impression about the issues.

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