Flu Shot ? or No Flu Shot ?

[Ypedal]

Well ?

 

[TylerDurden]

Never got one before, but... I will be the family guinea pig for the H1N1 vaccine. If it seems ok, then the family members at greater risk will get shots.

(Weak science, but the best we can do.)

 

[deardancer3]

Compromise.

yes, Got Seasonal flue shot, get that most years.

They said I was not as 'at risk' for HiN1 and we are short of vaccines here, so I passed.

 

[fechter]

At the hospital I work at, employees who choose not to get a flu shot are required to wear a mask when in patient care areas. They can't force you to get the shot, but they can 'strongly encourage' it. I always get the shot, but half the time it does not protect against the active strain for that year.

And why is there always a shortage every year? Is it like they can't figure out how many people there are or how to make enough? The flu kills way more people every year than terrorists, so why don't we spend more money trying to fight the flu than fighting terrorists?

 

[deardancer3]

And why is there always a shortage every year? Is it like they can't figure out how many people there are or how to make enough? The flu kills way more people every year than terrorists, so why don't we spend more money trying to fight the flu than fighting terrorists?

I went to Walgrens who was running ads- No supply; they said that no walgreens in town had any. Did not know who had any. Had to stop at Safeway for groceries anyway, so stopped at the Pharmacy to check; they had plenty they said, and the following:


Safeway told me they ordered vials instead of doses, and got way more vaccine than they needed. Walgreens, ran an adverising blitz, but didnt get enough since Safeway accidentally ordered too many.
--
So Walgreens spent the money on advertising and makes little money with little supply. Meanwhile Safeway is covered for free on the News as having plenty. (and I presume laughin' all the way to the bank)

This from the Pharmacist at Safeway.

d

 

[zukster]

Statistically, on the North American population in general, vaccinations lower the
number of people who get the flu, if the vaccine is developed in time anyway.

 

[Link]

Nah. Haven't even gotten the seasonal flu in years. I'm reasonably healthy and am pretty sure I'm not at risk for the pig version, so I'm not worried about that, either.

 

[EMF]

Only the young and infirm should get the flu shot for the H1N1 Swine flu. Those of us that are neither too old or too young, should leave these for those that need it. Or I guess maybe health care workers. Leave the shots for them. It is thought that any of the middle aged group have a resistance already, as we have been exposed to similar enough flu in the past and should have a built in resistance.

If you are older, say you are over 50, you DEFINITELY should NOT be given the nasal variety of the swine flu as this is LIVE organisms. The shot has only dead organisms and is safer for this age group. A child could be given the nasal spray variety, if the kid was healthy to begin with.

As for a "normal" flu shot, it is basically a crap shoot. If the drug companies can predict a close guess at the mutation, then it is effective. If not. Oh well- you are on your own. The darn things have to fit like pieces of a puzzle. Sometimes they guess right on the money, sometimes it is close enough,

If the mutation of the flu going around does not resemble closely the "dummy" version given in the shot, then the incorrect antibodies will be formed and they cannot "attach" to the flu bug and are quite worthless in defending you from a bout of the flu.

I will only start taking flu shots, when I become very weak,or my immune system goes to hell.

 

[zukster]

Agreed. Haven't had one since I was little.

 

[JUICED]

Get it!!!!!




Ed

 

[Drunkskunk]

I'll worry about H1N1 when pigs fly.

 

[EMF]

I'll worry about H1N1 when pigs fly.

Some said that the day that a black man became President of the United States, that "Pigs will fly!"

Well, what happened? Obama was elected as our new President and sure enough, 10 months later...

The Swine Flu!



*Rim Shot* :lol:

 

[pwbset]

I'll worry about H1N1 when pigs fly.

x2 Never taken a flu shot and never will.. I'll develop antibodies on my own thanks all the same. And if for some reason I die from it well.. that's the way the cookie crumbles. It's all "big medicine" bullshit. Pill Nationâ„¢.

 

[MitchJi]

Hi,

I'd rather take my chances with the flu:
[youtube]Suo3Zk6GnXg[/youtube]

 

[swbluto]

Hi,

I'd rather take my chances with the flu:
[youtube]Suo3Zk6GnXg[/youtube]

I appreciate the distrust for marketed drugs, but it seems that widespread distrust of vaccinations and resulting widespread disuse would only aid in the virus's spread, and I can assure you that 'rare' "adverse affects" from the flu virus will be far more prevalent than that from flu shots, so the societal and economic impact of the virus would be exacerbated.

But given how limited the supply apparently is, such a distrust may not actually affect how much of the population becomes innoculated for the foreseeable future.

Despite that stance, I'm a bit hypocritical as I'm not going to get the flu shot (Unless the death rate substantially increases) though my reasoning is a bit different - I hate needles.

 

[MitchJi]

Hi,

I can assure you that 'rare' "adverse affects" from the flu virus will be far more prevalent than that from flu shots, so the societal and economic impact of the virus would be exacerbated.

Do you think a treatment that triples the risk of hospitalization is a good idea?:

From Influenza Vaccines.pdf:

In order to determine whether the vaccine was effective in reducing the number of hospitalizations that all children, and especially the ones with asthma, faced over eight consecutive flu seasons, the researchers conducted a cohort study of 263 children who were evaluated at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota from six months to 18 years of age, each of whom had had laboratory-confirmed influenza between 1996 to 2006. The investigators determined who had and had not received the flu vaccine, their asthma status and who did and did not require hospitalization. Records were reviewed for each subject with influenza-related illness for flu vaccination preceding the illness and hospitalization during that illness.

They found that children who had received the flu vaccine had three times the risk of hospitalization, as compared to children who had not received the vaccine. In asthmatic children, there was a significantly higher risk of hospitalization in subjects who received the TIV, as compared to those who did not (p= 0.006). But no other measured factors—such as insurance plans or severity of asthma— appeared to affect risk of hospitalization.

“While these findings do raise questions about the efficacy of the vaccine, they do not in fact implicate it as a cause of hospitalizations,” said Dr. Joshi. “More studies are needed to assess not only the immunogenicity, but also the efficacy of different influenza vaccines in asthmatic subjects.”

Your assurances aside there is substantial evidence that vaccines are ineffective and unsafe.

 

[MitchJi]

Hi,

A related interview and article:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/2/shannon_brownlee_does_the_vaccine_matter
Excerpts:

Shannon Brownlee is an award-winning journalist, author, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. Her latest article in The Atlantic magazine, co-authored with Jeanne Lenzer, is called “Does the Vaccine Matter?” Shannon Brownlee is also author of the bestselling Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer. She joins me now from Washington, DC.…

It depends on what we’re talking about. So let’s make a distinction here between seasonal flu, which is the flu that we get—we see every winter, and pandemic flu or swine flu, what we’re seeing right now. For seasonal flu, we have a vaccine program, a public health campaign, that aims to get the people who are most at risk from seasonal flu vaccinated. So, we aim our campaign at the elderly, we aim our campaign at people who have—who are immune-compromised, who are ill with other things, who are more vulnerable. And it looks like that these people getting vaccinated is not producing the effect that we want, which is to reduce mortality in these groups. So, does the vaccine matter in the way that we’re using it? It’s not clear.

AMY GOODMAN: But in terms of effectiveness, when you talk about cohort studies, the placebo-controlled studies, etc.?

SHANNON BROWNLEE: Right. That is what we were most concerned with in the Atlantic Monthly article—in the Atlantic article. The magazine has a new name.

The effectiveness of the vaccine is what we’re questioning. And it looks like when you give young, healthy people flu vaccine, they’re able to mount a very good immune response, and they can then resist getting the flu. But when you give vaccine to people who are elderly, who have, say, diabetes or have cancer, are taking chemotherapy—there are any number of people who have compromised immune systems—they may not be mounting a very good immune response. So they get the vaccine, but it isn’t really protecting them.

And that’s where the question arises, is how effective is flu vaccine? Because in seasonal flu, we’re trying to aim our efforts at giving it to the people who are most vulnerable from dying from flu, and they may not be able to mount enough of an immune response to be able to resist flu, even when they get vaccine. So are we wasting a lot of money and a lot of effort in trying to get the vulnerable to get vaccinated, when it may not be doing them any good at all or may do very, very marginal good?

AMY GOODMAN: The Tamiflu, talk about a name from the past, the former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, who you mention in your Atlantic piece.

SHANNON BROWNLEE: Yes. The way we began building up our stockpile of Tamiflu began shortly after 9/11, when there was worry that we might be vulnerable to some sort of a biological attack. And so, the Bush administration and the Congress authorized the stockpiling of Tamiflu and Relenza, these two antiviral drugs, not only for the civilian population, but also for the military.

And at that time, Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense. He was also the former chairman of the board of one of the companies that manufactured Tamiflu—manufactured or held the patent, I can’t remember exactly which. And the decision was made under his watch. And it’s not clear whether or not he was involved in this decision, but he stood to gain financially, personally, from the stock that he held in this company.

AMY GOODMAN: How investigated has this been, his conflict of interest here?

SHANNON BROWNLEE: It was investigated at the time. A couple of places, other places, other magazines looked at it. I believe Fortune or Forbes looked at it. I can’t remember which. And it was looked at. And so, it was yet another event that was reported, and then everybody’s moved on.

AMY GOODMAN: …Talk about what you see as what could be a global pandemic.

SHANNON BROWNLEE: If we had—this swine flu does not look to be that pandemic, because it is a relatively mild flu. In fact, the CDC suspects that many people are actually being infected with swine flu and don’t even know it. They are asymptomatic. So, this is not that really bad flu that people are very worried about.

If and when that flu does hit, there are many questions. One is, could we produce enough vaccine to really stop transmission, to really halt transmission or slow it down? Number, two, who should you vaccinate first in order to reduce that transmission? Who’s going to be most vulnerable to dying from that flu, and how can you halt the transmission?

And:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1

Such comparisons have shown a dramatic difference in mortality between these two groups: study after study has found that people who get a flu shot in the fall are about half as likely to die that winter—from any cause—as people who do not. Get your flu shot each year, the literature suggests, and you will dramatically reduce your chance of dying during flu season.

Yet in the view of several vaccine skeptics, this claim is suspicious on its face. Influenza causes only a small minority of all deaths in the U.S., even among senior citizens, and even after adding in the deaths to which flu might have contributed indirectly. When researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases included all deaths from illnesses that flu aggravates, like lung disease or chronic heart failure, they found that flu accounts for, at most, 10 percent of winter deaths among the elderly. So how could flu vaccine possibly reduce total deaths by half? Tom Jefferson, a physician based in Rome and the head of the Vaccines Field at the Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected international network of researchers who appraise medical evidence, says: “For a vaccine to reduce mortality by 50 percent and up to 90 percent in some studies means it has to prevent deaths not just from influenza, but also from falls, fires, heart disease, strokes, and car accidents. That’s not a vaccine, that’s a miracle.”

When Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the response she got sounded more like doctrine than science. “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.”

Nonetheless, in 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the “healthy user effect.” They 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. To test their thesis, Jackson and her colleagues combed through eight years of medical data on more than 72,000 people 65 and older. They looked at who got flu shots and who didn’t. Then they examined which group’s members were more likely to die of any cause when it was not flu season.

Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”

The results were also so unexpected that many experts simply refused to believe them. Jackson’s papers were turned down for publication in the top-ranked medical journals. One flu expert who reviewed her studies for the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, “To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!” When the papers were finally published in 2006, in the less prominent International Journal of Epidemiology, they were largely ignored by doctors and public-health officials. “The answer I got,” says Jackson, “was not the right answer.”

 

[swbluto]

Your second defense amounted to concern of the statistical minority of immuno-compromised patients and other minorities. My argument applied to the population at large, not exceptions, as the population at large is the set of vectors that transmits the virus. If all of the healthy people actually were effectively vaccinated, then a much lesser portion of the immuno-compromised group would be infected by the virus.

However, your first defense questions the effectiveness of vaccines and this would undermine the first rebuttal. In response, I have no idea how effective it would be as I can't really predict the mutation rate of this particular strain of the flu, but history seems to suggest that flu shots have had some benefit, either that, or most people who have taken flu shots in the past were uninformed or idiots (which I guess I wouldn't dismiss too readily). This would require more investigation...

 

[retro]

The human body is an amazing organism. The redundancies built into it is without equal to anything man-made, vaccinations included. Now, to bypass the body's first line of defense by injecting live virus past the skin, into the tissue makes absolutely no sense. My grandparents were healthier than my grandchildren are and I know they never received a vaccination for anything. Now we juice up kids before their first breath with a barrage of vaccinations, and they're sicker for it Human kind has lived for tens of thousands of years just fine without a vaccination. I'll take my chances, my vitamin D and let big pharma get it's income elsewhere.

 

[Zoot Katz]

The human body is an amazing organism. The redundancies built into it is without equal to anything man-made, vaccinations included. Now, to bypass the body's first line of defense by injecting live virus past the skin, into the tissue makes absolutely no sense. My grandparents were healthier than my grandchildren are and I know they never received a vaccination for anything. Now we juice up kids before their first breath with a barrage of vaccinations, and they're sicker for it Human kind has lived for tens of thousands of years just fine without a vaccination. I'll take my chances, my vitamin D and let big pharma get it's income elsewhere.

AMEN!
I had to get polio shots along with small pox and some other vaccinations before I could start kindergarten in 1954.
My sister had mumps that I never caught but we shared measles and chicken pox.
Allergies were rare among kids when I was growing up.

The last nasty flu I had was about six years ago and I figured out why people die from the flu. . . it's because you want to.
I had a couple days this spring when I possibly had a minor flu. Mostly I just slept a lot, ached, drank juice, and added more garlic to the meal.

Staying off public transit and away from enclosed crowds helps with prevention.
Anti-biotics are another thing I avoid like the plague. I get better results from clay for treating infections, literally.

Getting a series of shots in order to obtain a visa precludes my travelling to "exotic" places.

 

[wasp]

anyone heard of jane burgermeister?
i vote never...

 

[liveforphysics]

My body is fighting the flu as I type this.

It's sucked. It's felt more severe than any flu or cold I've ever experienced. This is day 5, and I do feel like I'm over the hump, but I still feel pretty awful in about all respects.

I'm glad my body is fighting it naturally. I like the idea of my immue system getting some vetran combat experience.

On a serious note, I can see how this flu could kill (though I suppose anything can kill in the right situation). I've never had a flu/cold/illness which caused me to black out prior to this one, which caused it multiple times. A perticularly poorly timed black-out event could easily result in death.

 

[gogo]

caused me to black out

Wow, literally black out as in collapse on your feet, or more of a lay down and be dead to the world for a few hours?

My only experience with black out was when I got a methanol exposure and days later my eyesight went black and I became very uncoordinated and so didn't want to move, but I could still hear. That was freakin scary and I'm lucky it didn't happen while driving.

 

[liveforphysics]

caused me to black out

Wow, literally black out as in collapse on your feet, or more of a lay down and be dead to the world for a few hours?

My only experience with black out was when I got a methanol exposure and days later my eyesight went black and I became very uncoordinated and so didn't want to move, but I could still hear. That was freakin scary and I'm lucky it didn't happen while driving.

I don't use the term black-out lightly. I awoke a wet cold mess on the floor of the kitchen with a spilled water pitcher next to me. Never had any memory of getting out of bed for that one. I had my vision fade to black while in the shower, and barely had strength to manage a controlled slump to the bottom of the shower, and was once again, awakened cold and wet some point after the warm water had run cold. Similar event at work last night, just walking down the hall, saw my vision start having blotches of black clouds, and I'd learned from passed experience to get to the ground as quickly as possible. This time I didn't go unconcious, but it was amazing how weak my body felt for a minute or so. Barely able to make small movements in my arms and maintain a sitting position.

I consider myself a person of strong constitution with a young strong healthy body. I've never before lost conciousness in my life before this from anything that didn't involve a large amount of kenetic energy and my noggin (various motorsports and skiing wrecks). Even in Jujitsu I defend chokes well, and I've never blacked out from pain or human strikes. To have it happen 4 times in a week from a flu has been humbleing.

 

[Lessss]

I'm more interested in where this virus got all it's unique gene sequences.
I'm also interested in how so few companies have a worldwide lock on vaccine production and distribution.