Flu shots aren’t good science
scott.wiersdorf.org
scott.wiersdorf.org
If the problem is that "people" believe that a vaccine against one flu strain will protect them from getting sick from a variety of other viruses, it's a marketing problem.
This is not just a problem of CDC marketing, though. As the Atlantic article points out, the scientists that are publishing research showing a lack of effectiveness in vaccines are not getting equal treatment among their peers who still believe them to effective.
You can also see statements like this: http://www.cdc.gov/FLU/protect/keyfacts.htm
The single best way to protect against the flu is to get vaccinated each year.
The purpose of vaccination is not necessarily to save lives- it is most often given to healthy individuals who are not at any kind of risk of death- it is so they can avoid getting sick.
The life-saving claims for the elderly simply haven't been scientifically demonstrated, as the Cochrane review referenced by the Atlantic article points out- studies are below:
doi:10.1002/14651858.CD004876.pub2 doi:10.1093/ije/dyi274
Now, that is not a study itself, but a summary of prior studies. If you think the CDC has formed an improper conclusion, that's fine.
Here is the Cochrane review on the effectiveness of vaccines in the elderly: http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab004876.html
The summary: "In long-term care facilities, where vaccination is most effective against complications, the aims of the vaccination campaign are fulfilled, at least in part. However, according to reliable evidence the usefulness of vaccines in the community is modest. The apparent high effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing death from all causes may reflect a baseline imbalance in health status and other systematic differences in the two groups of participants."
In other words, like I said, the vaccine doesn't work all that well - but despite its relatively modest effectiveness, it is still of great importance in the very age group that you singled out as not receiving benefit.
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/10/journalists_si...
Also, is influenza vaccination really recommended for healthy adults, anyway? My impression was always that it was only worthwhile for people who would be at high risk from the disease.
As for the whole "it's all misguided groupthink, only a few brave people are sacrificing career success to speak truth to power" thing, I kinda have to roll my eyes. Maybe the author of the article is right, but most of the time when I've heard people say things like that, they don't actually understand the ideas they're criticizing and are being reflexively contrarian because that's a good way to make applause lights blink in the heads of their audience. Really, if most specialists in a field agree on something it's probably because it's true, and if you really think you've seen the light where everyone else has gone astray your point will be stronger if it stands on its own without the rah-rah anti-establishment social signalling.
From the Atlantic article (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1):
“People told me, ‘No good can come of [asking] this,’” she says. “‘Potentially a lot of bad could happen’ for me professionally by raising any criticism that might dissuade people from getting vaccinated, because of course, ‘We know that vaccine works.’ This was the prevailing wisdom.”
Your career will be damaged if you question the efficacy of the flu shot, because it is current medical doctrine. This kind of thing has happened lots of times before, as the Atlantic article points out.
Really, if most specialists in a field agree on something it's probably because it's true
You're treading dangerously close to an argument from authority here. What surprises me about this is that I would guess from your writing that you've got enough experience under your belt to have realized that in every field, the average person is mediocre. This isn't some tautological nonsense; what I'm saying is that if you were told that "most programmers agree that X," your reaction would probably be "yeah, but most programmers are actually crap at their job, why would I listen to them?"
You'd be right in that case, and you'd be right if you replaced programmers with doctors in the above. That most doctors believe in the flu shot isn't a reflection of the flu shot's greatness so much as a reflection of their training to that effect. Coupled with strong political forces pushing current doctrine, you have a situation where scientific research is being systematically subverted.
Yes, it's obviously true that anyone going stubbornly against established consensus will get in hot water. This is the case whether their position is correct or incorrect. In the first case, they're heroes; in the latter case, they're crackpots. It's rarely obvious to people outside the field which is which, and there's a lot more of the latter.
The contrarianism that I object to is when people who don't have enough expertise in the field to tell good ideas from bad seem to hold up going against consensus as somehow inherently noble, because most of the time they're just going to be encouraging the crackpots. This especially includes anything that glorifies the Galileo-esque "persecuted genius" archetype.
You're treading dangerously close to an argument from authority here. What surprises me about this is that I would guess from your writing that you've got enough experience under your belt to have realized that in every field, the average person is mediocre.
Argument from authority is completely valid when the cited authority is authoritative on the subject under consideration. If someone justifies a statement about algorithms with "because Knuth said so" and can cite where he said it, that's a pretty solid basis to go on. The very nature of science is such that "widely held consensus of recognized experts" is the ultimate authority on current knowledge. This is not a guarantee of correctness, but it's a strong argument that it's the most likely, reliable answer we have and there's almost never a good reason for people outside the field to reject such consensus.
The programming analogy falls down a bit in that the bar is somewhat lower for being considered "a programmer" than it is for being a reputable specialist in most scientific fields. If you narrow it enough to filter out the kind of "programmers" who fail FizzBuzz exercises, I expect you'd find that anything that 95% of them agree on is, in fact, far more correct than random chance.
You and I have enough knowledge of programming to be able to evaluate good vs. bad arguments, and can probably identify lots of places where common wisdom is suboptimal. But what would you tell someone who knows nothing about programming but needs to know how to evaluate ideas about programming? Sure, we know that most programmers are stuck in a rut coding in Blub, but someone outside the field can't tell the difference between "overly structured programming is just obfuscation to create job security, simplify things and use gotos for flow control" and "use first-class functions to make code more expressive and eliminate redundancy".
We'd all roll our eyes at the guy promoting goto statements as a route to more effective programming, right? Well, us dismissing "use more gotos" would look, to someone outside the field, exactly how doctors' reaction to the flu shot issue looks to you.
All of which is to say, TANSTAAFL.
Vaccines usually come with other toxic substances that will be injected in your body.
The same research articles that show influenza vaccines aren't useful also indicate that the risk of severe side effects (such as death) are low. Those must be weighed against the benefits, which in the case of the influenza vaccine, seem to be mild or unproven.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza#1976_U.S._outbr...
... the vaccine killed more Americans than the disease didTable 2. Reported number of new and cumulative confirmed fatal Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza cases in EU and EFTA countries, as 23 October 2009, 09:00 hours CEST, and in the rest of the world by country, as of 22 October 2009, 16:00 hours CEST.
The total at the bottom of the table is: 5,382
Perhaps you are reading that the total in EU alone is 269?
"Odds are, it has." If you're going to call out research as pseudoscience, don't write unvalidated statements like this.