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This is going to sound insanely insensitive, but did he get the vaccine? Actually, it is insensitive, because I would like to either use it in my arguments aga

This is going to sound insanely insensitive, but did he get the vaccine? Actually, it is insensitive, because I would like to either use it in my arguments against anti-vaxxers, or learn where I went wrong. I honestly worry about friends who don't vaccinate their kids, and I'd appreciate either vindication, or piece of mind that I shouldn't look for goblins ;)

kleer001 9y ago
IMHO getting vaccinated is more about herd immunity. Everyone I've ever heard who proclaimed heartily that they don't get vax either said it makes them sick or they never get sick. The first is unlikely, but some people do have reactions. It's more likely they had a coincidental cold or a psychosomatic reaction. The second is irrelevant. Getting a vaccination isn't about YOU, it's about the vulnerable people around you and the vulnerable that will interact with the people around you. Also you could be infected and have no symptoms, so pass it around without knowing. But I'm sure you already know that. I'm only mentioning it for fuel against the antivaxers you engage with, because they're endangering us all and need to be stopped.
- phaus 9y ago
  >IMHO getting vaccinated is more about herd immunity. Everyone I've ever heard who proclaimed heartily that they don't get vax either said it makes them sick or they never get sick. Its not a psychosomatic reaction. People frequently get minor, flu-like symptoms for a few days after getting a vaccine. While its not as severe as having the flu, people feel "sick" and so they accurately describe themselves as having gotten sick from the flu vaccine because it makes far more sense to talk about these things in the context of the way they make us feel, and no sense at all to talk about the underlying science behind vaccines that doesn't magically make us feel better just because its technically correct. I get minor, flu like symptoms, which are still a pain in the ass, about 85% of the time when I get a flu vaccine (which is every year). Its still significantly better than getting the flu, but its pretty obnoxious that the medical community tries to shame people for noting the objective fact that getting a vaccine is still rather unpleasant. Its like our society is incapable of understanding nuance. You're forced to either take the side of anti-vax lunatics or pretend that vaccines have no side-effects. Also, about your comment on the vaccination being for the good of the "herd". That's mostly correct, but it doesn't tell the whole story. According to the CDC, if you get vaccinated and then get the flu, the severity of it will be somewhat lessened and the chances of it becoming a severe illness will be reduced. So its still allegedly worth it for the individual.
  - masonic 9y ago
    "if you get vaccinated and then get the flu, the severity of it will be somewhat lessened and the chances of it becoming a severe illness will be reduced." I know of absolutely no science that supports that oft-repeated claim about influenza as a whole. If the flu infection is from a different strain from any that person was vaccinated for, there is no demonstrated cause-and-effect from the vaccine that provides blanket mitigation for different strains.
    - phaus 9y ago
      It might not be supportable, but I was reading an article where some guy from the CDC said you're much better off if you've gotten it. I might be able to find it, but I suspect you're right that its not necessarily based on research.
  - Simon_says 9y ago
    > our society is incapable of understanding nuance. That's the pattern I see in a lot of public discourse. What I see all the time is: X may be a better position than Y, even though argument A for X is wrong and argument B for Y is very well thought out.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    "I get minor, flu like symptoms, which are still a pain in the ass, about 85% of the time when I get a flu vaccine (which is every year)." Just another data point: I've never gotten flu-like symptoms from the vaccine, and I've gotten vaccinated every year for many, many years now. At worst, my shoulder (around the injection site) is sore for a day after I get the shot. I've never had any symptoms at all from the nasal vaccine.
  - kleer001 9y ago
    > Its like our society is incapable of understanding nuance. Nope, it's the side effect of having bodied cognition. We're optimized to make good-enough decisions in less than a second with three pounds of expensive to maintain rarefied material. Short cuts within hacks within crufty work-arounds. It's amazing that it works so well, naturally. But it's not American, it's not Western, heck, it's not even human, it's the nature of thought and action in an ever changing world. Thinking in binaries is a supremely powerful way to chop up the world and let's not discount it as a first approximation towards survival.
DenisM 9y ago
Flu vaccination cuts rate of infection by 2/3. You can't draw any conclusions from a single incident. > or learn where I went wrong Statistics and probability.
colechristensen 9y ago
The flu vaccine is made by educated guess for which strains will be prevalent for the following season. It is not always correct. It is important, especially for certain groups of people, but not as essential as some other vaccines. We are not going to cure or eradicate influenza with vaccines like we have/can/are with many other diseases.
masonic 9y ago
This is going to sound insanely pedantic to this commenter, but was the fatal strain in this case even present in this year's vaccine? I'd bet that it wasn't. Fact is, for the past several years, the three/four candidate strains chosen for the USA vaccine were badly mismatched for what strains actually circulated in the wild. Flu vaccines aren't like genetic vaccines (like for HPV), which are essentially foolproof for the targeted strain(s) and carry little risk of side-effects. Flu vaccines are more of a scattershot approach, with the "misses" generally ignored by the media.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  CDC is estimating this year's vaccine is ~30% effective against the A(H3N2) virus in circulation. https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/han00409.asp https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/han00409.asp In addition, influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) in general has been lower against A(H3N2) viruses than against influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 or influenza B viruses. Last season, VE against circulating influenza A(H3N2) viruses was estimated to be 32% in the U.S. CDC expects that VE could be similar this season, should the same A(H3N2) viruses continue to predominate.
  - DrScump 9y ago
    That's overall effectiveness against all H3 viruses, meaning that it isn't even totally effective against the strain it was specifically designed to protect against. Plus, it's very early in the season. That's 70% failure already, and every new case grows that number. Edit: typo
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      I think you mean H3 viruses.
      - DrScump 9y ago
        Yes, sorry.
- 9y ago
empath75 9y ago
The vaccine isn’t particularly effective this year.
mratzloff 9y ago
In light of the fact that this person's friend died last week, perhaps you might lead with condolences for their loss before trying to figure out how you can use this death as a data point to vindicate your argument...
stevenwoo 9y ago
This year's vaccine is only 10% effective at preventing the worst strain. Part of the reason is we incubate the vaccine in eggs(?) and that doesn't work as well for this particular strain.
pmoriarty 9y ago
I've recently read that at best flu vaccines only offer 60% immunity. They are far from guaranteeing you won't get infected. On the other hand, 60% is better than 0%. I always get my flu shots each year.
dang 9y ago
Anti-anti-vaxx is pure flameland of the most tedious sort, and therefore off topic on HN. Although I appreciate the self-awareness in your comment, it's also a pretty uncivil thing to post; so while it's good that you phrased it that way, better still would have been not to post it at all. Moreover, the data point you're asking for would rather obviously not have the significance you're ascribing to it. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16190609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16190609 and marked it off-topic.
- throwaway5752 9y ago
  Anti-vaxxers kill people, dang. I don't disagree with this, but I sure hope you mod anti-vax even more agressively.
  - tomhoward 9y ago
    C'mon, the whole point is that if it's a topic that elicits an aggressive response or an insistence on aggressive moderation (with indignant use of the world kill thrown in), it doesn't belong here. There's unlimited opportunity to prosecute that cause elsewhere. Let's keep this place for discussing and learning interesting new things.
- natecavanaugh 9y ago
  I apologize if it was inflammatory, I didn't know that it was a flame bait topic (which I guess shows my own bias). Thank you for your response and the info :)
  - dang 9y ago
    Appreciated!

kleer001 9y ago

IMHO getting vaccinated is more about herd immunity. Everyone I've ever heard who proclaimed heartily that they don't get vax either said it makes them sick or they never get sick. The first is unlikely, but some people do have reactions. It's more likely they had a coincidental cold or a psychosomatic reaction. The second is irrelevant. Getting a vaccination isn't about YOU, it's about the vulnerable people around you and the vulnerable that will interact with the people around you. Also you could be infected and have no symptoms, so pass it around without knowing. But I'm sure you already know that. I'm only mentioning it for fuel against the antivaxers you engage with, because they're endangering us all and need to be stopped.

phaus 9y ago
>IMHO getting vaccinated is more about herd immunity. Everyone I've ever heard who proclaimed heartily that they don't get vax either said it makes them sick or they never get sick. Its not a psychosomatic reaction. People frequently get minor, flu-like symptoms for a few days after getting a vaccine. While its not as severe as having the flu, people feel "sick" and so they accurately describe themselves as having gotten sick from the flu vaccine because it makes far more sense to talk about these things in the context of the way they make us feel, and no sense at all to talk about the underlying science behind vaccines that doesn't magically make us feel better just because its technically correct. I get minor, flu like symptoms, which are still a pain in the ass, about 85% of the time when I get a flu vaccine (which is every year). Its still significantly better than getting the flu, but its pretty obnoxious that the medical community tries to shame people for noting the objective fact that getting a vaccine is still rather unpleasant. Its like our society is incapable of understanding nuance. You're forced to either take the side of anti-vax lunatics or pretend that vaccines have no side-effects. Also, about your comment on the vaccination being for the good of the "herd". That's mostly correct, but it doesn't tell the whole story. According to the CDC, if you get vaccinated and then get the flu, the severity of it will be somewhat lessened and the chances of it becoming a severe illness will be reduced. So its still allegedly worth it for the individual.
- masonic 9y ago
  "if you get vaccinated and then get the flu, the severity of it will be somewhat lessened and the chances of it becoming a severe illness will be reduced." I know of absolutely no science that supports that oft-repeated claim about influenza as a whole. If the flu infection is from a different strain from any that person was vaccinated for, there is no demonstrated cause-and-effect from the vaccine that provides blanket mitigation for different strains.
  - phaus 9y ago
    It might not be supportable, but I was reading an article where some guy from the CDC said you're much better off if you've gotten it. I might be able to find it, but I suspect you're right that its not necessarily based on research.
- Simon_says 9y ago
  > our society is incapable of understanding nuance. That's the pattern I see in a lot of public discourse. What I see all the time is: X may be a better position than Y, even though argument A for X is wrong and argument B for Y is very well thought out.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  "I get minor, flu like symptoms, which are still a pain in the ass, about 85% of the time when I get a flu vaccine (which is every year)." Just another data point: I've never gotten flu-like symptoms from the vaccine, and I've gotten vaccinated every year for many, many years now. At worst, my shoulder (around the injection site) is sore for a day after I get the shot. I've never had any symptoms at all from the nasal vaccine.
- kleer001 9y ago
  > Its like our society is incapable of understanding nuance. Nope, it's the side effect of having bodied cognition. We're optimized to make good-enough decisions in less than a second with three pounds of expensive to maintain rarefied material. Short cuts within hacks within crufty work-arounds. It's amazing that it works so well, naturally. But it's not American, it's not Western, heck, it's not even human, it's the nature of thought and action in an ever changing world. Thinking in binaries is a supremely powerful way to chop up the world and let's not discount it as a first approximation towards survival.

DenisM 9y ago

Flu vaccination cuts rate of infection by 2/3. You can't draw any conclusions from a single incident. > or learn where I went wrong Statistics and probability.

colechristensen 9y ago

The flu vaccine is made by educated guess for which strains will be prevalent for the following season. It is not always correct. It is important, especially for certain groups of people, but not as essential as some other vaccines. We are not going to cure or eradicate influenza with vaccines like we have/can/are with many other diseases.

masonic 9y ago

This is going to sound insanely pedantic to this commenter, but was the fatal strain in this case even present in this year's vaccine? I'd bet that it wasn't. Fact is, for the past several years, the three/four candidate strains chosen for the USA vaccine were badly mismatched for what strains actually circulated in the wild. Flu vaccines aren't like genetic vaccines (like for HPV), which are essentially foolproof for the targeted strain(s) and carry little risk of side-effects. Flu vaccines are more of a scattershot approach, with the "misses" generally ignored by the media.

maxerickson 9y ago
CDC is estimating this year's vaccine is ~30% effective against the A(H3N2) virus in circulation. https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/han00409.asp https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/han00409.asp In addition, influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) in general has been lower against A(H3N2) viruses than against influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 or influenza B viruses. Last season, VE against circulating influenza A(H3N2) viruses was estimated to be 32% in the U.S. CDC expects that VE could be similar this season, should the same A(H3N2) viruses continue to predominate.
- DrScump 9y ago
  That's overall effectiveness against all H3 viruses, meaning that it isn't even totally effective against the strain it was specifically designed to protect against. Plus, it's very early in the season. That's 70% failure already, and every new case grows that number. Edit: typo
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    I think you mean H3 viruses.
    - DrScump 9y ago
      Yes, sorry.
9y ago

empath75 9y ago

The vaccine isn’t particularly effective this year.

mratzloff 9y ago

In light of the fact that this person's friend died last week, perhaps you might lead with condolences for their loss before trying to figure out how you can use this death as a data point to vindicate your argument...

stevenwoo 9y ago

This year's vaccine is only 10% effective at preventing the worst strain. Part of the reason is we incubate the vaccine in eggs(?) and that doesn't work as well for this particular strain.

pmoriarty 9y ago

I've recently read that at best flu vaccines only offer 60% immunity. They are far from guaranteeing you won't get infected. On the other hand, 60% is better than 0%. I always get my flu shots each year.

dang 9y ago

Anti-anti-vaxx is pure flameland of the most tedious sort, and therefore off topic on HN. Although I appreciate the self-awareness in your comment, it's also a pretty uncivil thing to post; so while it's good that you phrased it that way, better still would have been not to post it at all. Moreover, the data point you're asking for would rather obviously not have the significance you're ascribing to it. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16190609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16190609 and marked it off-topic.

throwaway5752 9y ago
Anti-vaxxers kill people, dang. I don't disagree with this, but I sure hope you mod anti-vax even more agressively.
- tomhoward 9y ago
  C'mon, the whole point is that if it's a topic that elicits an aggressive response or an insistence on aggressive moderation (with indignant use of the world kill thrown in), it doesn't belong here. There's unlimited opportunity to prosecute that cause elsewhere. Let's keep this place for discussing and learning interesting new things.
natecavanaugh 9y ago
I apologize if it was inflammatory, I didn't know that it was a flame bait topic (which I guess shows my own bias). Thank you for your response and the info :)
- dang 9y ago
  Appreciated!