I worry that it's sort of the same line of thinking that leads folks to skip vaccinations for their children, i.e. "What about the Tuskegee experiments and MKUltra? We can't trust government claims about health risks."
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/why-pandemic-flu-sho...
To a rational mind, 200 years of practical evidence and the elimination of several deadly pathogens should outweigh a handful of legitimate but isolated counterexamples, but they argue against it anyway to the extent that they would risk their children contracting measles, tetanus, diptheria, mumps or rubella over an anecdotal correlation of autism...which even if causal, is difficult, time-consuming and expensive to treat, but not deadly. Yes, sometimes vaccine supplies get contaminated or have adverse effects, but so do batches of milk, spinach, peanut butter, and Chipotle burritos. It hardly justifies a concerted argument against any of these things.
It is craziness, and no amount of logic, evidence, patience or negotiation ever convinces these people otherwise. We may as well dismiss them and move on.
>During years when the flu vaccine is not well matched to circulating influenza viruses, it is possible that no benefit from flu vaccination may be observed.
I'm crazy for not allowing myself to be injected with several strains of influenza virus when the most-optimistic estimates of efficacy are around ~40%.
Calling it a flu "vaccine" seems like a misnomer to me, given the rapidly-mutating nature of the virus.
>We may as well dismiss them and move on.
This is HN.
Of course that won’t save you from the “I f’ing love science”-brigade down voting without rebuttal.
So no, I don't think defending anti-vaxxers with that example is being "fair". I realize you're not really defending their overall position, but even the line of thinking you proposed is deeply flawed.
The flu jab isn't very good, but, in most years it's better than nothing and it's pretty cheap for the government to give me a jab compared to hospitalisation if I get really sick.
Perhaps something like: "maybe it makes sense for the average person to defer to a doctor's opinion with regard to flu vaccine".
In Australia it is common for an employer to pay for their employees to have the seasonal flu vaccine, one or two nurses come to the office / work site to administer the vaccine. So the only new people you're being exposed to are those nurses, for a brief few minutes