On the Efficacy of Flu Vaccine

The Atlantic is running a major article questioning the received wisdom about flu vaccines and antivirals, for both seasonal flu and H1-N1. "When Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the response she got sounded more like doctrine than science. 'People told me, "No good can come of [asking] this,"' she says... Nonetheless, in 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the 'healthy user effect.' Jackson's findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the 'frail elderly' didn't or couldn't. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all." Read below for more excerpts from the article.
The annals of medicine are littered with treatments and tests that became medical doctrine on the slimmest of evidence, and were then declared sacrosanct and beyond scientific investigation. ...

This is the curious state of debate about the government's two main weapons in the fight against pandemic flu. At first, government officials declare that both vaccines and drugs are effective. When faced with contrary evidence, the adherents acknowledge that the science is not as crisp as they might wish. Then, in response to calls for placebo-controlled trials, which would provide clear results one way or the other, the proponents say such studies would deprive patients of vaccines and drugs that have already been deemed effective. ...

In the absence of better evidence, vaccines and antivirals must be viewed as only partial and uncertain defenses against the flu. And they may be mere talismans. By being afraid to do the proper studies now, we may be condemning ourselves to using treatments based on illusion and faith rather than sound science.

Comments

Re:The one crucial point

[Goldberg's Pants]

Of course they can.

Bollocks can they. The ideal that pharma wants is to keep you alive as long as possible in ill health.

Pharma doesn't make a dime from healthy people. If you think otherwise, you are an idiot.

This is an industry which has been shown repeatedly to lie about the efficacy of their products, with faked peer review journals, suppressed negative results, lawsuits, corruption etc...

And yet people trust that the companies who patented the H1N1 vaccine BEFORE the Mexico event have done testing and would never release a defective product, or put out a seasonal vaccine which is anything less than claim, despite the fact that the inserts accompanying their very own products state that vaccines have not been tested for long term carcinogenic, mutagenic and other effects.

The reason cancer hasn't been cured, and I've had medical professionals agree with me on this, is because they've yet to figure out how to make the cure more profitable than the treatment of the disease.

Sure, pharma don't want you dead. They just want you using their products for as long as possible, and have no interest in your good health. They want you in poor health, but not quite ready to die.

In no other avenue of life would people blindly trust a company to not mislead or try to make as much money as possible off them. Pharma answers to one thing just like every other capitalist venture. Shareholders. Their entire existence is to make money first.

I just get so angry with this blind worship of the pharmaceutical industry when they are not better than used car dealers who willingly sell you something which might kill you so long as there's profit to be had. McDonalds do it. Smith and Wesson do it. General Motors do it. Pfizer do it. GlaxxoSmithkline do it.

You're best interests are purely secondary.

Re:The one crucial point

[JWSmythe]

    Hey now, scare mongering doesn't work if people figure out that it's only there to scare people.

    Nope, this isn't the 1918 influenza pandemic. This is a cold, that will make an awful lot of people sick, just like happens every year, and some people will die, just like every year. The chances are really in your favor, unless there are other circumstances for the individual to consider, that you may feel like you want to die, like when you're really sick any year, but the odds of death or permanent injury are insanely small. There's a higher risk of death from a slip and fall accident in the home, or from an auto accident.

    But hey, the gov't says we should be scared, Fox News says we should be scared, I'm shaking in my shoes.

   

Re:There are randomized controlled trials

[ahabswhale]

I'd explain it all to you but you're too big of a moron to tell the difference between trolling and flame-baiting so there's no point.