Great example is bird/pig flu, serum was untested and used only thanks to massive hype. More people died from vaccination than actual flu. And best part are doctors which refused to have themselves vaccinated :-)
disclaimer: I am well educated and my children got full vaccination.
Edit: I was doing academic influenza drug discovery research at the height of the H5N1 threat. 59% morality rate [1] is no "hype". Your generalization of viruses mutating "too fast" is a false clause. Vaccination against influenza isn't "useless", it's actually effective [2].
[1]: http://www.who.int/influenza/human_animal_interface/EN_GIP_2...
[2]: https://www.landesbioscience.com/article/19917/full_text/#lo...
Candidate vaccines to prevent H5N1 infection have been developed, but they are not ready for widespread use.
http://www.who.int/influenza/human_animal_interface/avian_in...
I wouldn't call the bird/pig flu story hype. There was a wide consensus that these viruses were a threat and might have the potential for a pandemic. It killed a lot of people, and as far as I remember it had a higher mortality rate than most flus. So the threat was real.
Now we know the virus probably didn't have the potential. In hindsight. I hope the next time there is a preventable pandemic threat people don't trump up the anti-pharma rhetoric and say "last time it wasn't so bad, was it?"
But there is also good chance to convince government to buy huge quantities.
Flu kills and becomes pandemic nearly every year. Bird/pig flu was just a bad year.
There are more effective measures to fight flu. For example closing schools for couple of weeks. Also employers should allow tele-commuting during flu seasons.
Today, with all the data we have on incompetence and failure in most intelligence agencies, we can still have some hope...
And checking basic facts != conspiracy theories.
(In Ontario, for example, a cost-benefit analysis shows that a universal free influenza inoculation program reduces costs of the medical system; see http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj... .)
I can turn the argument around: companies don't want people to get vaccinated so they can sell more expensive palliative care. Why would a hospital want to get less business if more people are vaccinated and so don't need their services?
If a given argument predicts X and it predicts not-X, then it's a poor argument. This appeal to the profit motive is a poor argument.
There is strong competition in medical industry. One company sells vaccine, some others sells medicine and hospital equipment.
Competition in the US Health System certainly doesn't do a good enough job at driving costs down...
I don't like to use these strong words, but I do find it dangerous and reckless when people with nearly no medical knowledge want to reason against proven methods on the basis of costs and the hatred of "evil, profit seeking companies".
If mistakes were made it's up to the medical establishment to judge about and avoid them in the future. Anticapitalists should not play a role in that.
There is an economic aspect to health care. I am accusing those who want to make recommendations on (extremely weak) economic grounds without any medical and scientific reasoning.
Baseless anticapitalist conspiracy theories should not play a role in healthcare.
1918 was just a bad year, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic
>It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—3 to 5 percent of the world's population at the time—making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.
If it didn't the DOD would probably find some better way to spend that money, like buying a missile or something. :P
Of course that's not true every year.
Those who suffer that bad from the seasonal flu are very old, very young or have a very weakened immune system.
As the parent of twins born three months early, that sort of attitude is distressing. Vaccination protects more than just the person vaccinated.
Of course getting vaccinated is the right thing to do, even if it's only partially effective. My dad has emphysema, so I know where you're coming from.
We also know that healthy children and teens without any known risk factors die from the flu
Austin’s case is not unusual, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released Thursday. In fact, 43 percent American children who died from flu were perfectly healthy beforehand, CDC researchers found. While conditions such as cerebral palsy and asthma can make flu especially dangerous for a child, there’s no way to tell which children will become seriously ill or even die from seasonal flu, the researchers warn.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/49465633/ns/health-cold_and_flu/t/...