When HN users recommended it
1 HN user recommended this in 2018, in one comment.
20072026
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
Gaia Herbs Black Elderberry Syrup
Amazon's catalog no longer lists this product (checked 2026-11-02). The name comes from the link HN users posted.
> All right, so it was tested in a randomized clinical trial.
Three or four actually.
> Tamiflu trial said total duration of symptoms were 78 hours for the placebo
And again, the Tamiflu data was faked. You can read the background on this here: https://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e7303
When the real data was finally FOIA'd or whatever, it became clear that it no longer had even the minimal efficacy that was originally claimed. The way that FDA trials work is that you need two phase III studies showing a drug is more effective than placebo, but you're allowed to conduct unlimited trials that don't find any advantage over placebo without being required to make the data from these other studies public. That's what happened in this case, there were one or more additional studies that showed it wasn't effective, and when you included the data from the additional studies to calculate the overall effect the advantages disappeared.
There are several books about this, but since every time I link to books people complain that I'm trying to trick them into reading, here's an Internet article about what happened instead: https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/10/...
The main caveat on elderberry, other than the lack of FDA monitored clinical trials, is just that the stuff you're likely to find in your local drug store is Sambucol, which isn't the best quality. But you can go and buy this online that's actually good quality and not that expensive:
https://www.amazon.com/Gaia-Herbs-Black-Elderberry-Syrup/dp/...