3 ms·

Willing to discuss it but I am definitely one who thinks it's a "scam", "mainstream" example articles on ineffectiveness: "Flu vaccines didn't work that well i

• defrost 4mo ago
  The first example cites "the worst performance ever". Taking that as a given how bad was it? This season's vaccines were around 25% to 30% effective in preventing adults from getting sick enough from the flu that they had to go to a doctor's office, clinic or hospital, according to a CDC report this week. Of a hundred adults that would have had to seek medical treatment / take a day off (had there been no vaccine) 70 adults went to the doctors and 30 did not. Children who were vaccinated were about 40% less likely to get treatment at a doctor's office or hospital. (As above, of one hundred kids that would have gotten sick, 40 did not ) The questions really should be .. did people die that could have been saved, was it cost effective to vaccinate a hundred million people to reduce the percentage of those who contacted flu and then got sick (and did the vaccination reduce the numbers of people in contact). As it stands, by your examples, the flu vaccine didn't perform well that year, in comparison to others, but it hardly looks as though it had no effect whatsoever.
• jghn 4mo ago
  There are a handful of factors, I'll approach this as if you're acting in good faith. 1) Most people who claim to have "the flu" don't actually have influenza. Thus, if they take a flu vaccine, and get "the flu", they blame the flu 2) The vaccine does not create a perfect boundary. It's a population scale benefit. It makes it less likely one gets infected, it makes it less likely that someone who gets infected has serious disease, and it makes it less likely that someone infected passes it along 3) The "flu vaccine" is a prediction, trying to guess the strains that will be prevalent in the upcoming season Sometimes they guess wrong, and it's less effective. If we supported mRNA technology this could be improved.
• jlebar 4mo ago
  It's an amazing fact of mathematics that even a vaccine that has relatively low efficacy can completely neutralize transmission if enough people in a group take it. This is especially true in the case of the flu because it has a relatively low R0 of approximately 1.3, meaning that without intervention/vaccines, each infected individual infects on average 1.3 other people. The vaccine just needs to be effective enough to drive the reproduction rate below 1 for the virus to die out. We do not have good data on how effective flu vaccines are at neutralizing transmission. But for the sake of argument, let's take these relatively "bad" years for the flu where they prevented 40% of doctor's visits. Suppose that corresponds to merely preventing 40% of transmissions. The other 60% of transmissions still occur. In that case is it even possible to drive R_eff (the effective reproduction rate of the virus) below 1? It turns out, yes! With an R0 of 1.3 and an effectiveness of only 40%, you stop the spread of the virus after vaccinating only 60% of people. Details on the math: https://claude.ai/share/8e8ffef7-ba33-44aa-a2a6-ca3b9be6d516 https://claude.ai/share/8e8ffef7-ba33-44aa-a2a6-ca3b9be6d516. You can also extend the conversation and ask more questions!