'Extremely impressive': melanoma jab trial results excite doctors
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The world's most terrifying coin flip. Especially as melanoma kills when it spreads to other tissues -- like the brain and lungs. If you're on the wrong end of that coin flip, and the recurrence comes up in a bad spot, you're in serious trouble.
There are many cancers -- like thyroid cancer -- that are rarely fatal at their site of origin. They kill when they recur in distant tissues. Anything to reduce the odds of recurrence in such cancers can have outsized positive effects on mortality.
> The vaccine and the Keytruda brought the risk of recurrence down to 25%, Long said. However, she cautioned the results were a “signal” with a larger trial needed to evaluate the true impact better.
This is an outstanding result, and one hopes that it can also extend to other types of cancer.
There's really no reason to delay offering cancer sufferers that treatment, even if the benefit is only a "signal."
No, really, that’s my best reply. This isn’t worth dignifying with a reasonable response because it’s laughably out of touch with reality.
That’s astoundingly incorrect. LOL.
This "those not taking are showing lack of empathy" carries a significant emotional blackmailing tone, and ends up making those on the fence less likely to join your side and it's frankly quite off-putting.
It makes you sound like you are just parroting sound bites that you like instead of properly evaluating the information you receive and deciding accordingly. It's the opposite of critical thinking and just as dumb as those believing that taking horse dewormer is a good alternative treatment.
Obviously each of those exceptions means doctors are recommending someone get the shot before 60.
The flue shot is also highly recommended for people at higher risk of getting infected like Teachers. A vaccine is simply less harmful than the flue even for healthy people. So unless the odds of inflection are low it’s considered a good idea.
Post-hoc rationalization bogs me to no end. If you feel good about taking it, fine. But why keeping this idea that anyone who declined it is automatically a brainless moron?
Complaining about it just makes you look worse.
> learn something or keep quiet
What I learned, by talking with multiple doctors, is that I shouldn't worry about getting the vaccine until I am in my sixties.
Which is the root of your mistake.
~97% of Doctors get the flue vaccine, more than just about any other group. What’s relevant medical advice for you isn’t always generalizable. You may be the unusual exception.
Doctors deal with sick people. Yes, perfectly rational to take one action while not blindly recommending it to the public at large.
I don't know what you are trying to argue with this statistic, but it surely does not invalidate my original point.
What about a 1 on 1 consultation with a doctor makes you think the advice they give you is a blind recommendation?
The general advice knowing nothing about you is to get the flue shot. A doctor looking at you can tell if your BMI is over 40, but a poster/website etc can’t.
Thus the default is to recommend everyone get a flue shot while a Doctor may say you specifically have little need.
The general advice should be for people that are otherwise healthy, or be very specific about the risk factors being considered for the average case. Someone with a a BMI of 40 should be worrying over a whole lot of other things beyond the flu, and conversely it makes no sense to advise overall healthy people to be taking any type of drugs just because the risk is not that high.
Granted, this calculus changes with infectious diseases with high fatality rates. This is why it's absolutely sensible to recommend everyone to be vaccinated for measles (1-2% IFR) and polio (5% IFR for kids, 20+% IFR for teenagers), but questionable to apply the same logic to something like influenza which is 100 to 1000 less fatal (0.01% IFR) and when fatality rate is highly concentrated (75%) on 65+ people.
Not from a public health standpoint unless healthy people would actually be harmed.
1/3 of adult Americans are obese. It varies by country, but add in various other health issues and risk factors like smoking or being around lots of other people at work and most people have some risk factors elevating their benefit from minimal to meaningful.
So as everyone benefits at least a little and some people get a very significant benefit the general recommendation is for everyone over 6 to get a flue shot.
Mind you, the flu virus is highly mutable. Vaccinating healthy people does very little for "herd immunity" because most vaccines contain only year-old strains and at best it will not prevent infection but merely reduce the window of time where people are contagious.
Even if you’re healthy simply spending less time sick is a meaningful benefit. Perhaps you only get the flu one year in 20, that’s still a world of suck you can largely avoid. And frankly it only gets better from there.
Not only this is borderline unethical to be used as support for any serious, national-level health policy, it is also bound to backfire and create even more suspicion from those who are not ideologically aligned with the Government du jour.
In other words, if your health messaging is hiding crucial details because more information "is less effective" (at what? Informing or getting people to comply to a certain pre-defined plan?), then don't complain later when people share videos online about "what they don't want you to know".
What white lies?
Same deal with a huge number of other heath issue, you can tell basically anyone to exercise more and it’s good advice. Not for Olympic athletes, but from a public health perspective “get up a move” is a perfectly reasonable message.
> at what?
Keeping people healthy. The idea that the only possible benefit is saving your life is moving the goalposts on health policy.
You specifically would benefit from getting an annual flue vaccination. Your doctor’s recommendation that it’s not something to stress about is likely correct, but it doesn’t somehow mean getting it would be a net negative for you personally.
Skipping it isn’t a big deal for you, so if you’re stuck with some irrational fear then no big deal. But would you benefit? Yes.
The physical pain and struggle that you endure during vaccination is very real (you fight the spike protein fragment) versus a relatively weak virus now.
Also with the vaccination and the virus, you get some very nasty side-effects (micro-thrombosis, etc).
Calling it a guaranteed benefit is odd. It may benefit in some circumstances, but each case has to be individually assessed.
For now it has very low real-world utility for most people but it practically guarantees real suffering, not just “irrational fear“. Because of that I don’t think that forcing everybody to get again vaccines is a good idea.
If you think of vaccination as meaningful pain and struggle I can wonder how you rate actual illness. Compared to the vaccine, I’d rate Influenza at about 3 orders of magnitude worse.
> Calling it a guaranteed benefit is odd.
The odds of avoiding it for 40+ years is quite low when it hits ~10% of the population each year. So balancing getting the shot every year for the rest of your life vs several effectively guaranteed infections is an obvious benefit. I mean sure you could die tomorrow, but assuming an early death is hardly a winning strategy for life.
How? Does it achieve any real result? It's ineffective and does not address other issues that have a much greater impact in the obesity epidemic in the US: food deserts, the corn industry pushing processed foods everywhere and making it so cheap that leaves no good choice for poor people, a horribly wrong "food pyramid" recommendation, car-centric urban environments that robs people of opportunities for natural activity, etc, etc, etc...
> The idea that the only possible benefit is saving your life is moving the goalposts on health policy.
This is the complete opposite of what I am saying. I don't even know how you could interpret what I said as such. I am saying that if obesity is such a serious problem that even a flu can be fatal, then the health agencies should be putting more effort in spreading that message instead of "hey, this flu might save you in case you are obese, so you should take it. Don't worry about addressing the real problem you have, you should be fine as long as you can keep taking the drugs we think it's best for you".
To put another way: if you get the FDA to put cigarette-style, super-graphic pictures of diseases affecting obese people in the label of every food product that comes in a box or can, then I will start giving some credibility to them. Until them, I have absolutely no reason to care about or listen to any of their "general" recommendations.
> Everyone 6 months and older in the United States, with rare exception, should get an influenza (flu) vaccine every season
Brazil has a very reputable public vaccination system, and we only vaccinate people on the schedule for people over 55 (I think)
Germany has an extensive public health insurance system, so they are not interested in paying vaccines for people who don't really benefit from it.
What vaccines do is dramatically shorten the time needed for a strong immune response because your body built infrastructure to help fight that specific disease. This tends to dramatically alter what happens afterwards. To the point you may not notice the symptoms or have significant symptoms instead of a hospitalization etc.
Edit: To be more specific B-Memory cells live in bone marrow. So when a virus starts reproducing in your lungs or a cut etc there’s communication lag before those T-Memory cells can do anything during which the virus is reproducing. In the very short term after vaccination the body is tricked into acting like an active infection is going on which causes various symptoms, but even here it’s unlikely to prevent initial infection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
It's true that the COVID-19 initial variants were very dangerous, and that the vaccines worked against these variants.
However, the virus in 2024 is different from the one in 2019, but the side-effects, you are "guaranteed" to pay them.
You really have to think twice.
https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
Also, it’s likely if the 2024 virus was transported back to 2018 it would be far more deadly. At this point basically everyone has had prior infection or a vaccine for a closely related strain and there’s much better treatment for the infected. Thus the odds of anyone dying drops in ways that have nothing to do with the virus itself and a great deal to do with what happened over the last 5 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/04/why-do-we-call...
If it is only a post covid England/UK thing let me know I was/am assuming it was around beforehand.
"Jab" for "injection" is not one of them. It grates on the eyeballs, or at least my eyeballs.
It's as if we suddenly decided to call surgery "gashing".
But I roll my eyes at the phrase “jab”.
It conjures images of Bill Deblasio asking about a “burger element” on TV trying to trade French fries and burgers for vaccines.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/04/why-do-we-call...