"Does the Vaccine Matter?" - The Atlantic

[daveOS]

“Does the Vaccine Matter?”
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200911/brownlee-h1n1

Some highlights for me…

“Healthy User Effect”

[Jackson and her colleagues] hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term. People who don’t get vaccinated may be bedridden or otherwise too sick to go get a shot. They may also be more likely to succumb to flu or any other illness, because they are generally older and sicker.

“Tom Jefferson has taken a lot of heat just for saying, ‘Here’s the evidence: it’s not very good,

The only way to know if someone has the flu—as opposed to influenza-like illness—is by putting a Q-tip into the patient’s throat or nose and running a test, which simply isn’t done that often.

These questions have led to the most controversial aspect of Jefferson’s work: his call for placebo-controlled trials,

In the flu-vaccine world, Jefferson’s call for placebo-controlled studies is considered so radical that even some of his fellow skeptics oppose it.

We have built huge, population-based policies on the flimsiest of scientific evidence. The most unethical thing to do is to carry on business as usual.

“We can’t just let people die,” says Cox.
Students of U.S. medical history will find this circular logic familiar: it is a long-recurring theme in American medicine, and one that has, on occasion, had deadly consequences.

 

[NormaRegula]

Thanks for posting the article, daveOS.

Found this interesting:

THE TERM INFLUENZA, which dates back to the Middle Ages, is taken from the Italian word for occult or astral influence. Then as now, flu seemed to appear out of nowhere each winter, debilitating or killing large numbers of people, only to vanish in the spring.

 

[Third_Density_Resident]

The thing that stands out the most for me is this:

But while vaccines for, say, whooping cough and polio clearly and dramatically reduced death rates from those diseases...

Sez who??? Certainly not the untampered statistics! This is one of those things that's repeated so often that everyone takes it for granted, and no one ever goes back to the data to check whether it's true or not. See _http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/graphs/ for a wealth of information that dispels the above nonsense.

 

[Lauranimal]

Sez who? Here is a little article the 'they - them' who sez...

_http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/report-vaccine-advisors-had-financial

"Report: Vaccine Advisers Had Financial Conflicts
By Susie Madrak Saturday Dec 19, 2009 6:00pm

Well! I'm feeling much safer now!

WASHINGTON — A new report finds that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a poor job of screening medical experts for financial conflicts when it hired them to advise the agency on vaccine safety, officials said Thursday.

Most of the experts who served on advisory panels in 2007 to evaluate vaccines for flu and cervical cancer had potential conflicts that were never resolved, the report said. Some were legally barred from considering the issues but did so anyway.

In the report, expected to be released Friday, Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, found that the centers failed nearly every time to ensure that the experts adequately filled out forms confirming they were not being paid by companies with an interest in their decisions.

The report found that 64 percent of the advisers had potential conflicts of interest that were never identified or were left unresolved by the centers. Thirteen percent failed to have an appropriate conflicts form on file at the agency at all, which should have barred their participation in the meetings entirely, Mr. Levinson found. And 3 percent voted on matters that ethics officers had already barred them from considering."