How A Nerd Decides To Get The H1N1 Vaccine | Hacker News Reader

How A Nerd Decides To Get The H1N1 Vaccine

unlimitedmagazine.com

15 pointsDuncanKinney25 comments

I'd much prefer percentages to the flat number of deaths in the article; it's much less misleading.

Assume your chance to contract swine flu is in the upper bound stated in the article, 35%. Multiply that by the pneumonia chance of one in a thousand, .1%. Finally, multiply again by chance of death from pneumonia (20%) and you get a minuscule .007% chance of swine flu death, or seven people out of a hundred thousand.

That's how a nerd decides not to get the swine flu vaccine.

the reason why health officials often want everyone to get vaccines is two fold, and has nothing to do with your chance of getting the bug:

1. consistent supply regardless of demand. when the killer bug does hit and suddenly everyone wants the flu vaccine there won't be enough supply because the manufacturers and distributers have never dealt at that scale before.

practically, this seems wasteful in times like these when we don't need a huge supply....but compared to some other things we spend taxes and the profits of certain involved actually increasing...it's actually not that killer expensive, and in fact would be good for the economy.

2. some people can't get vaccines. one reason is if they have a complicating disease or are susceptible to side-effects or are traveling from a country that failed on the supply issue. it is for these people that everyone else should get the vaccine.

Let's review your calculation here:

Odds of getting the flu, feeling like absolute crap for a week, losing a week of work, being shunned by everyone I know for two or three weeks because I'm a carrier of the swine flu, but accidentally giving some of my acquaintances the flu anyway, thus prolonging the epidemic: 35%.

Okay, stop. I'm going to the pharmacy for my vaccine right now. [1]

My only fear is that I'm already too late. I'm not feeling so well today.

---

[1] Not that I think it's in stock yet, or anything. But maybe I'll call them.

I agree with you here; those are all valid reasons to get a shot. My issue was with the use of the death rates as justification, which is much less reasonable.

Odds of getting the flu, feeling like absolute crap for a week

The few people I know that have had H1N1 reported that they actually felt like crap for more like a month, The initial 'flu symptoms' passed after a week, but they were left feeling weak and 'drained' for another 3-4 weeks beyond that.

Personally, I'm tempted to get the shot, and I've never bothered with flu shots in the past out of fear of the side effects (I have a barely functioning immune system).

I have a barely functioning immune system

That is why you should ask your doctor if you should get the vaccine. Immunosuppressed are on the high risk list and are encouraged to get the vaccine.

Not wanting to have damn cold and hot fever for days on end is how I decide to get the normal flu jab, and the swine flu one when it comes out later.

I call a 7/100,000 chance of death a moderate risk, not miniscule. Also, the 1/3000 chance of contracting pneumonia might be an incentive for some people to get the shot. Further, those figures are estimates based on the current virus. It is possible that the virus will mutate to become more deadly (I have no data on how likely but I've read that H1N1 mutates easily).

Also, those figures are based on one year. If you don't get vaccinated and don't contract H1N1 this year, what are the chances that you will get it in the future? My figuring leads me to believe getting the shot is the rational choice.

I felt it was a rational choice and did get mine today. My local healthcare centre in Stockholm were giving it for free and I just had to fill in a form and roll up my sleeve.

I asked a nurse earlier if they had given shots to all the people who were in high risk groups already (didn't want to deprive anyone) and she said "yes last week, but you taking a shot is protection for them too". Easy choice for me.

What side effects did you get from the shot?

12 hours after the shot. None so far (other than a slight pain around there area where the needle was inserted, which was expected).

The vaccine only helps for about 2 years. Then the effect wears off.

Not only that, but the shot is being said to only be 90% effective. So even if you get it, you're only reducing your risk from 0.007% to 0.0007%, not zero.

But, I'm in a country where you don't even get the choice anyway (UK). You get the vaccine when the NHS says you do - and regular healthy people aren't allowed it yet.

Well, last time I had an immunization, I went into a coma, so it's a pretty easy choice for me. Otherwise though, I'd have though it'd be a no brainer.

Presumably a true nerd would discount personal experience as anecdotal and get the shot anyway. ;)

The article is entirely free of side-effect data. Reducing my H1N1 infection probability from 25% to 2.5% might be worth a poke in the arm, but more severe side effects have been reported. If I had to guess, I'd say the benefits outweigh the costs, but without data for both, that's nothing more than a guess.

There is also research that suggests that getting a regular flu shot may increase the chance of getting H1N1, so it's possible that the interaction between the various flus and vaccines is more complicated than we thought.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/study...

Mayhaps or not... via twitter @aetiology (epidemiologist) -- seasonal + H1N1 vaccine: good or bad? New study contradicts unpublished Canadian data: http://bit.ly/6FP2g (sounds like both are preliminary)...

This is some interesting analysis, but it only considers the negative effects of not getting the flu and neglects the negative effects of getting it.

Consider this poor woman who got dystonia after receiving a flu vaccine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEN5KGwNGeo

She was a cheerleader and how she can't walk.

The nerd logic also neglects the probability that the flu vaccine will actually help. In the lab, 50-80% of the vaccinated resisted the exact same strain, however in the wild, only 10% did not get the flu and the number of hospitalizations was not affected at all.

To do a proper analysis, one must use proper probabilities and statistics and consider the probabilities of outcome with the benefit/harm that could be caused by that outcome.

Sometimes I get the feeling that if I got a needle and was hit by a car two weeks later, I could convince people it was a side-effect.

I had my ribcage sawn open by the medical system so they could cut out a piece of my heart and replace it with a chunk of a pig's. I'm still around and doing just dandy. My suspicion is that the people who can do that sort of thing probably have a better notion of what this vaccine will do than I do.

Not that any of this invalidates any of your arguments, of course; I'm just talking.

Edit: Perhaps another way of looking at it would be: I don't really want a doctor who has never written a line of code in his life to tell me how to write a program. I suspect that modern medicine is not quackery and does involve actual expertise, and (equally significantly) that the medical system has a greater amount of medical expertise than I do.

I'm not scared of H1N1, I'll take a chance of the flu over the shot. Since I work mostly from home the odds of contracting the flu are lower for me anyway.

This nerd will simply wait for his (non-US) government to take that decision for him. I don't have any insight into the current state or effects.

That might work for your, but I have the interesting problem of not being in the risk group in my country but for some reason being in the risk group in the US. So which government should you trust?

I haven't seen any side effect data aside from the oft-quoted 1 in a million instance of GBS and occasional anaphalactic reactions.

Is that statistic based solely on the 1976 vaccine? If so, I'm not sure it's relevant today.

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