This is my understanding. It basically would have marginally reduced the cost of the flu coming through, right? But thats not the impression that I would get from any of the discussion here. Am I wrong?
On your own impression? Probably not.
I’m not militant about getting the flu shot every year. I think I would be if I were in a company where my getting sick could get a friend killed.
This the opposite of your understanding. The benefit to the individuals in a group from the whole group taking the vaccine is actually much larger than the benefit to an individual in the group of taking the vaccine solo.
You can read more about it here (and ask more questions!). https://claude.ai/share/8e8ffef7-ba33-44aa-a2a6-ca3b9be6d516
> Combined with the brutal arithmetic at higher R0R_0 R0 , this is a large part of why flu vaccination programs are generally justified on individual protection against illness and severe outcomes rather than on a realistic expectation of achieving herd immunity and stopping circulation.
On the one hand, in a military setting you can feasibly achieve 100% compliance. But if you don't stop transmission (which it sounds like we don't have good data saying it would), you don't get herd immunity.
So I think you're back to just the benefits of reduction in disease, which is not nothing, but it is marginal like I said originally.
(For me, "marginal" would mean that the costs were roughly equal to the benefits. I think you'd have a hard time convincing me that saving the lives of even just 1% of the people who would normally die from the flu -- between 10k and 50k people a year -- is roughly equivalent to the cost of giving out flu shots. I suppose you could argue that the benefit is marginal to individuals who have a low probability of dying from the flu, and marginal to a society which has relatively low vaccination rates overall.)
The other thing is that, according to the Claude data here, the vaccine is actually relatively effective at preventing the transmission of some flu variants, 50% effective against influenza B! If so, there would be a clear group benefit to that, you only need (1 - 1/1.3) / 0.5 = 46% of people to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity to that strain.
"The best recent direct measurement is the FLUTES study (JAMA Network Open, 2024), which tracked secondary infections after flu entered US households across 2017–2020. The result: the estimated effectiveness of influenza vaccines for preventing secondary infections among household contacts was 21.0% (95% CI, 1.4% to 36.7%). Note how wide that confidence interval is — the lower bound is nearly zero."
And
"This is consistent with older household work. A 2013 study found no evidence that vaccination prevented household transmission once influenza was introduced; adults were at particular risk despite vaccination — strikingly, 9 of 11 adults with household-acquired influenza were vaccinated in that sample."
So most people on base who were going to get infected and transmit are still going to do so. Some portion of them have a better time with the illness if it does come around, which won't happen all the time. Contrast that with the costs of the program (side effects, time, whatever cons you can think of), and it seems like you might not be in slam dunk territory.