Flu vaccine paradox adds to public health debate
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
The PR on the flu-vaccine/campaigns and the efficacy of the vaccine itself have long been misaligned. Good to hear scientists and public health-officials start to acknowledge this. We'll see how long it takes to trickle down to the general public.
One of the little quirks of the Patriot Act was to make it impossible to sue vaccine makers -- which is exactly why since 2001 you've seen a proliferation of every grocery store offering vaccines.
Presumably you are a start-up minded person. Imagine the legal challenges you would face in trying to come up with a business plan where you could inject biological material into people....think your lawyer would permit?
As for if 23% effeciancy is "worth it", well the protection you are getting must be offset by the negative effects caused by vaccines, if you doubt there are negative effects see Legal Immunity above.
Presumably you are a start-up minded person. Would you do business if someone said "We need you to implement some very complex code, rush it into production on our timetable, and if there's a hiccup, your users will sue you into oblivion."
USA PATRIOT Act Sec. 1013 (a)(10), (b)(5,6) mentions research, distribution and stockpiling of vaccines but nothing about liability.
There was a decision in 2011 that might be of interest: http://blogs.findlaw.com/decided/2011/02/cant-sue-drug-compa... http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/02/22/us.scotus.vaccines/index...
There ought to be a formal name for the fallacy of assigning greater credibility to earlier information, but I'm not sure what it would be.
Do you deny the primary point? That its illegal for you to sue vaccine makers?
Meanwhile, as long as we rely on private industry to supply the vaccines we need, we have to protect the manufacturers from obviously-frivolous lawsuits that nevertheless require decades of research and millions of dollars in pointless, unproductive studies to prove that they're frivolous. For some reason this field attracts kooks... or haven't you noticed?
Moreover, this is not about "can't sue in case of national emergency". You can't sue period.
Other countries don't do this, why the US? Those poor uncivilized europeans with no vaccines.
Do you also drive cars where you can't sue Ford if it explodes?
Beyond that, other countries can and sometimes do do this. There's been discussions of limiting liability for Ebola vaccine manufacturers in the UK, because of the rush to market for them.
Thats a funny way to say "big pharma bribed politicians".
Its amazing that the US was able to develop any technology, I mean imagine what state we would be in if you could sue car and plane manufacturers. Or if we could sue doctors?
More people literally died this year than most years. So I am going to say an emphatic: yes, it is bad.
Nobody is suggesting no vaccine would be an improvement so that isn't relevant. What is relevant is figuring out if we can do better, for example, instead of calculating risk in Feb for the upcoming winter, can we improve manufacturing so we can forecast in e.g. July, or better look at the data every month and change the formula mid-year if required (so people getting the vaccine in August and December might get a different formulation).
As I said, until someone suggests cancelling flu vaccines, the argument that it is "better than nothing" isn't relevant. Instead we should assume the vaccine is staying and compare it to itself.
There are lots of people doing so. Probably very few here on Hacker News, but there are many in the real world. Many people who read the linked article will use that as an excuse to not get the flu vaccine next year.
The idea that its one vaccine in the first place that is being "hyped" is wrong, each year a new vaccine is created, and its done based on the strains of the flu that seem likely to be prominent. One of the reasons this year was worse than normal is that the strains that were prominent weren't what was predicted.
I don't think anyone would be against developing a better vaccine, though I do think lots of people would be opposed against trading off efforts to assure that each years vaccine made under the current process gets well promoted to the public and distributed to achieve that. Those aren't the only possible uses of resources in our society, and there is no reason that efforts to develop are better flu vaccination system need to be traded off against efforts to assure the reach of the current system.
I'm not sure that this is true. From a purely market-driven perspective, pharma is able to successfully move this product each year, without risk of liability, and without additional R&D. As long as there is a PR machine around this current product that continues to "reach" and drive customers, then what's the incentive to engage in expensive R&D needed to develop the next round?
Agreed. Once it becomes a priority with the subsequent funding/grants, I think that's when we'd see movement. Ironically, however, I wonder if the hype around the current program even slows adoption of new priorities.
Though, perhaps acknowledgments such as the type referenced by public health officials in this article portend the start of some movement.
>left without a chair when the current gravy train ends when better vaccines are deployed
I wonder if their thinking is that this problem is easily fixed through acquisition if/when the time comes, especially in an industry as M & A-driven as pharma. Meanwhile, gravy-train.
Well, my comment was pointing more to the disparity between the PR around the vaccine vs. the reality of it. It's well-known that it's a hit-or-miss proposition each year and, here, we're seeing evidence of further holes borne of the annual effort itself. That is, there's now a downside to actually following the advice, beyond side effects and ineffective vaccines.
So, I'm speaking more to the juxtaposition of that reality against the "vaccine-is-everywhere-better-get-it-or-you-might-die" kind of PR in which public health officials and pharma engage every year.
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/federalsta...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/flu-vaccine-only-23-effective-...
"We have kind of hyped this vaccine so much for so long we are starting to believe our own hype."
Scientists and doctors are just as susceptible to bias as the rest of us. We'd all do well to remember that.
Well, it's productive if there's really a "conspiracy", right? Short of "blind contrarianism", there is certainly reason enough to be skeptical. At a minimum, public health officials have been putting forth an annual vaccine campaign PR effort that seems significantly overstated with regard to the true efficacy of flu vaccines, and this hasn't been bad for big pharma.
Now, we can say they were doing it for the right reasons, but we can't ignore the credibility gap they are creating.
More generally, I am not sure why we have a notion that anything that counters the mainstream version of events is automatically to be dubbed conspiracy theory in the dismissive sense. It's actually even weirder to encounter so much of that sort of attitude on a site called HackerNews, where there have been routine calls to keyboard arms over domestic surveillance and the like.
But, I've also noticed here an adherence to scientific dogma that borders on the religious at times. It creates blind spots and a certain overstated assuredness. Overall, it's hard to put into words, but it is very real.
Let the downvotes commence.
Conspiracy theories are about faulty reasoning. In particular, they involve highly inconsistent evaluation of evidence, and rely heavily on post-hoc rationalization.
You say that "anything that counters the mainstream version of events is automatically to be dubbed conspiracy theory in the dismissive sense." That's simply not true. What's happening is that the only people who happen to be countering the mainstream version of events are doing so with conspiracy theories.
Show me some good arguments that counter the mainstream version of events and we can talk. Nobody has done so thus far.
When I talk about conspiracy theories, it's not because people are saying the flu vaccine is ineffective. It's because people are talking about crazy stuff like how vaccines have been pushed hard in the past decade because of a non-existent provision of the PATRIOT act.
"The idea basically is that your immune system
is occupied elsewhere. It would be like getting
the swirling ball of death on your Mac where your
operating system is doing something else rather
than opening the file."Should we, perhaps, be questioning whether it makes sense to vaccinate against things we can overcome in a few days without harm ?
Of course I am speaking of otherwise healthy adults, and YMMV.
We're all pretty used to it so it doesn't seem like a big deal but it's actually very dangerous.
There's actually a lot of controversy around these numbers, with the CDC itself acknowledging that it's challenging to truly know for a number of reasons [1].
Here's a pretty remarkable quote from that page:
>"most people who die from seasonal flu-related complications are not tested for flu, or they seek medical care later in their illness when seasonal influenza can no longer be detected from respiratory samples"
So, it's really tough to know. As a result, some allege that the estimates are inflated as part of the campaign to ensure vaccination.
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.h...
The impact is spreading the flu to potentially a huge number of people. Some of those people may ultimately die from the flu that you gave them, and that's a big deal.
Pertussis is similar. Adults are highly unlikely to die from whooping cough, but it kills millions of kids every year. So as an adult, you should get the tdap booster at least every ten years.
For almost everyone these are painless shots with no side-effects, typically covered by insurance, and at least in the US, often available at the pharmacy, no appointment neeeded.
At $25/shot it seems unlikely that the vaccine costs more. The fact that my HMO gives it away for free suggests that they think it's a net financial gain to vaccinate, and they don't even see the costs from lost productivity.
You assume nobody asked the question. Perhaps it has been asked and answered "yes."