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For Some Medical Workers, a Flu Shot Or Possible Job Loss
theodp writes "Want to work at Winthrop Hospital? Roll up your sleeve, and we'll talk. TIME reports that every employee at the Long Island hospital — from doctors and nurses who care for patients to the administrative, housekeeping and food-service personnel — must be vaccinated against both seasonal and H1N1 flu or face termination. The mandate comes from the health department of New York, the first state to require all health-care workers to be vaccinated against influenza. Meanwhile, two-thirds of parents say they'll avoid flu shots for their little ones like, well, the flu. So who should you believe — Dr. Bill Frist or 'Dr.' Bill Maher? Before you decide, perhaps a consultation with Dr. Google is in order."
The summary is a little sensationalistic. It says 2/3 of parents are avoiding 'flu shots, whereas the article quotes 22% as the figure, with the remainder saying they would definitely vaccinate, or that they would try to vaccinate.
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This isn't new; if anything, mandatory vaccination laws have become much more lenient in the United States than they used to be. In the early 20th century, 11 states had fully mandatory vaccination laws, not just "must get vaccinated as a condition of attending public schools" or "must be vaccinated as a condition of working in certain occupations" sorts of things. Rather, it was a requirement for living in the jurisdiction that you must be vaccinated. Massachusetts's mandatory smallpox vaccination law was upheld by the Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1905, which is still the main precedent on the subject.
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"Why is it you can't sue the makers of vaccines, if the vaccine makes you sick?"
In order for vaccination to "work" - from a public health standpoint - a majority of the population needs to be vaccinated. (I think the number's 75%.) If you are giving that many people a shot someone is going to get sick, even if there is nothing "wrong" with the vaccine. Add to that the fact that vaccines are a low margin product - per the supply/demand curve, it needs to be cheap as possible so the most people will get it.
So, you have a product that:
1) will definitely make someone sick and/or kill them
2) You are barely making any money on it
3) there is no "informed consent" defense - most vaccines are mandated.
Why would any company make such a product when they will inevitable get sued for far more than the profit from it? No one would. So the US government, in order to induce the production of vaccines, gave vaccine manufacturers immunity from suit and set up a fund to compensate the people they KNOW will be hurt.
Short answer - you can't sue for injury from a vaccine because, if you could, there would be no vaccines.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
On our volunteer fire department. Particularly the EMS people. We see a lot of people with chronic respiratory diseases, COPD, and the elderly and people with weakened immune systems. The flu could kill them. Since they spend most of their time shut in, first responders are a possible vector.
So, yeah, we're getting flu shots and so are the ambulance and hospital people. If you're in the military, they vaccinate you against shit I've never even heard of.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's kinda obvious that you have never worked in health care. Let me 'splain Lucy:
Aside from actually getting health care providers to _actually_ wash their hands, sinks and hand washing don't do much against aerosolized particles especially when someone is coughing in your immediate vicinity.
You can also spread nasties in all sort of interesting ways, like say, EKG leads, which have been proven to be a vector for MRSA. That reusable blood pressure cuff in the emergency room triage that has been used on all sorts of patients? Think it gets "disinfected" after every patient by the triage nurse? Ha!
Rapidly mutating
This is _exactly_ why we need to all get some immunity to H1N1 now- the vast majority of the population has no previous exposure to H1N1. Luckily whats currently circulating isn't that bad. If it mutated to a more deadly variety- and there was _no_ natural immunity and _no_ artificial immunity (via the vaccination) then things would be bad.
Only in danger if you're a 'fat slob'? Then you're a fucking idiot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic
'Most of its victims were healthy young adults'
'global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 pandemic is not known, but it is estimated that 10% to 20%'
I'm not panicking, but I'm going to take my 1 in a million chance of negative side effects and get the shot- not just for myself, but in the hope the world never sees 1918 again. We have the means to prevent it, its cheap, its simple, and it'd be a fucking travesty if morons like you were the vector for another occurrence.
"151 dead from Swine Flu in Mexico", on recounting, turned out to be 6.
I don't know where your non-cited figure of "6" deaths from the original swine flu outbreak in Mexico came from, but maybe it was from a misinterpretation of a report detailing the deaths of 7 patients at a single tertiary care hospital in Mexico city during a single month. The New England Journal of Medicine article that detailed the fate of the 98 patients acutely ill with the swine flu in that hospital at that time also references that 85 people in Mexico were known to have died as of May out of 4910 confirmed cases, a fatality rate of 1.7%.
Fortunately only Mexico during the initial outbreak reported such a high fatality rate. This is very fortunate as almost no young person in the world had any kind of immunity to this strain. In all likelihood when you come down with it you will be 'lucky' enough to only have to suffer a few days of bed-bound misery.
I'm a healthy skeptic.
Skepticism is good, but you've jumped way beyond that into conspiracy theories and paranoia.
I'll stick with preventative measures, as opposed to a shot that may or may not be effective this season
Doing nothing does not count as a preventative measure. It is true that usually with the seasonal flu vaccine scientists must guess months beforehand what strains to put in the vaccine and since they don't always guess right the vaccine is usually only about 70% effective, but as for pandemic H1N1 the vaccine is an excellent match and it should give almost everyone who gets it protection.
The vaccine if they really worked it wouldnt matter how many people got the vaccine. The people who got the vaccine would be protected, and the people who didnt would only be harming themselves.
That would be true if "really worked" was a binary, 100% or 0% status. This is not the case.
Vaccines do not protect everyone they are given to (the vaccine merely trains immune systems, after all, which differ from person to person). Even if they were foolproof, vaccines cannot be administered to everyone - even if the risk of complications is far less than the risk of the disease in most people, there may be individuals (e.g. very young infants for the flu vaccine) for whom that is not the case. These still-vulnerable individuals benefit instead from "herd immunity":
One way to make yourself safe from a disease is to make yourself immune, so you can't get the disease. If that is impossible, another way to make yourself safe is to live in a population who have mostly made themselves immune, so you have no contact with anyone who can give you the disease.
Unfortunately, herd immunity also allows people to "defect" from their vaccinations; that's the entire reason why people would even consider skipping a vaccination in the first place! Why expose yourself to the nocebo effect, when you can simply free-ride off the immunity of others? They say that confusing correlation and causation leads to autism, you know!
http://www.cdc.gov/H1N1flu/vaccination/pregnant_qa.htm
"Does the 2009 H1N1 flu shot have an adjuvant or squalene in it?"
"Adjuvants are agents that are sometimes added to a vaccine to make it more effective. There are no adjuvants (such as squalene) in either the 2009 H1N1 or seasonal flu shot used in the United States."
This simply means that you willfully misunderstand statistics. A vaccine that saves millions of lives at the risk of a few hundred is a justifiable risk. The same logic applies to warfare: we sacrifice the lives of the few to save the many. It is painful and regrettable, but it must be done.
That is a FAR cry from saying that vaccines "cause disease" or that this is a manufactured pandemic to make money.
At least 62% of the U.S. population is under the age of 45. How does conferred immunity from the 1957 asian flu help them? What about the world?
You may have only gotten the flu once. The plural of anecdote is not data. Epidemiology is data, and it argues against you.
If your car never fails in the 10 years that you drive it, does it mean that mechanics are perpetrating fraud? Think about it.
If the vaccination works, you won't get sick, no matter what the rest of the world does.
Incorrect. With a sufficient number of vaccinated individuals in a population, an effect call heard immunity comes into play. This protects people who cannot get the vaccine (people allergic to it, etc.) or who the vaccine does not work on.
There has been a 4 year study done in Ontario on this with respect to seasonal flu vaccines and found favorable results.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/science/july-dec08/fluvaccine_10-31.html
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time