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I'd just like to check in to say to all the New Yorkers that hate Bloomberg: take heart and hold in there, we only have five days left before he leaves office for good.
I'd just like to check in to say to all the New Yorkers that hate Bloomberg: take heart and hold in there, we only have five days left before he leaves office for good.
then the equally vomit inducing de Blasio takes the reigns.....
The article talks about the flawed methodology that has led to overstatements about the efficacy of the flu vaccine as well as fallacies in the data. The researchers from the article have found that there have been no clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of the flu vaccine in the elderly. They also found fallacies in long accepted data about how many seniors lives have been saved from the vaccine.
The researchers concluded after a systematic review that for kids under the age of two, the currently licensed vaccines “are not significantly more efficacious than placebo". They found that the shot reduces the absolute risk that a child over the age of 2 will catch the flu by about 3.6 percent. In healthy adults, those with the vaccine have about a 1% chance of catching the flu while unvaccinated adults have about a 4% chance of catching the flu. They do note that the live mist vaccine is more effective in reducing one's risk to 17% from 4% without the vaccine.
With that said, there is absolutely no evidence supporting flu vaccination for children under the age of two which is a part of the Bloomberg mandate. They have no idea at all if the vaccine works for the elderly and it provides a small benefit to everyone else. The takeaway from the article is that the benefits of the flu vaccine have been overstated. I strongly believe that mandating a vaccine is completely and totally wrong and doing so with a vaccine with such a low( and even unknown in some cases) efficacy rate just makes the whole thing that much more ridiculous.
Here is the full article about pediatric deaths from influenza between 2004 and 2012.
If you look at Table 1, 94 deaths were infants under 6 months. If their mothers had been vaccinated, the majority of those babies would not have died.
In the 6 month to two year age group, there were 117 deaths.
Over all, 90% of the children who died were not vaccinated. Deaths occurred rapidly. Many children died before they could be hospitalized. Many who died were otherwise perfectly healthy.
The authors concluded that vaccination of infants over the age of 6 months is indicated.
Your thesis seems to be that since data on effectiveness is lacking, that means the vaccine is not worth giving. Lack of data does not provide evidence one way or another. As to why data is lacking, your article notes:
"The dearth of controlled research on seniors stems in part from the fact that the U.S government considers such clinical trials unethical. Based on an idea known as clinical equipoise, scientists can’t test, in a randomized controlled trial, a treatment that the larger medical community already considers to be effective, because doing so would involve denying treatment to half of the participants, potentially putting them at risk. 'We’re in a difficult spot,' Shay says—since the CDC already recommends flu shots to seniors, the agency can’t suddenly turn around and ask them to participate in a clinical trial that might deny them the standard of care."
It is not true that there are no studies on the effectiveness of influenza vaccines in the elderly. Clinical trials and effectiveness studies are not the same thing.
This one looked at the immune response of the high dose flu vaccine compared to the regular vaccine. It was a clinical trial. Because there was no placebo arm, it avoided the ethical problem of comparing vaccine to no vaccine groups. The high dose vaccine produces a stronger antibody response.
This one showed the effectiveness was, as predicted, higher for the newer vaccine:
You are confounding absolute risk and effectiveness. They are not the same. A reduction in absolute risk from 4% to 1%, in your example of adults above, translates to an effectiveness of 75%: Risk among unvaccinated group − risk among vaccinated group divided by Risk among unvaccinated group.
Just to nit pick a little, efficacy and effectiveness are not the same. Efficacy is calculated for a population which is 100% vaccinated. Effectiveness is used under real life conditions. That brings us to the contribution of herd effect and the level of vaccine coverage need to produce that effect:
"The objectives of vaccination coverage proposed in the United States - 80% in healthy persons and 90% in high-risk persons - are sufficient to establish herd immunity".
The bottom line is that children who die from the flu are 900% more likely not to have been vaccinated. That does not include those who were ill enough to be hospitalized but did not die.
By not vaccinating because you feel the vaccine is not effective enough, you contribute to failure to achieve herd immunity.
Sure, we need a better flu vaccine. The scientists are working on that. For now we need to make the best use we can of the ones we have.
If you look at Table 1, 94 deaths were infants under 6 months. If their mothers had been vaccinated, the majority of those babies would not have died.
In the 6 month to two year age group, there were 117 deaths.
Over all, 90% of the children who died were not vaccinated. Deaths occurred rapidly. Many children died before they could be hospitalized. Many who died were otherwise perfectly healthy.
The authors concluded that vaccination of infants over the age of 6 months is indicated.
Your thesis seems to be that since data on effectiveness is lacking, that means the vaccine is not worth giving. Lack of data does not provide evidence one way or another. As to why data is lacking, your article notes:
"The dearth of controlled research on seniors stems in part from the fact that the U.S government considers such clinical trials unethical. Based on an idea known as clinical equipoise, scientists can’t test, in a randomized controlled trial, a treatment that the larger medical community already considers to be effective, because doing so would involve denying treatment to half of the participants, potentially putting them at risk. 'We’re in a difficult spot,' Shay says—since the CDC already recommends flu shots to seniors, the agency can’t suddenly turn around and ask them to participate in a clinical trial that might deny them the standard of care."
It is not true that there are no studies on the effectiveness of influenza vaccines in the elderly. Clinical trials and effectiveness studies are not the same thing.
This one looked at the immune response of the high dose flu vaccine compared to the regular vaccine. It was a clinical trial. Because there was no placebo arm, it avoided the ethical problem of comparing vaccine to no vaccine groups. The high dose vaccine produces a stronger antibody response.
This one showed the effectiveness was, as predicted, higher for the newer vaccine:
You are confounding absolute risk and effectiveness. They are not the same. A reduction in absolute risk from 4% to 1%, in your example of adults above, translates to an effectiveness of 75%: Risk among unvaccinated group − risk among vaccinated group divided by Risk among unvaccinated group.
Just to nit pick a little, efficacy and effectiveness are not the same. Efficacy is calculated for a population which is 100% vaccinated. Effectiveness is used under real life conditions. That brings us to the contribution of herd effect and the level of vaccine coverage need to produce that effect:
"The objectives of vaccination coverage proposed in the United States - 80% in healthy persons and 90% in high-risk persons - are sufficient to establish herd immunity".
The bottom line is that children who die from the flu are 900% more likely not to have been vaccinated. That does not include those who were ill enough to be hospitalized but did not die.
By not vaccinating because you feel the vaccine is not effective enough, you contribute to failure to achieve herd immunity.
Sure, we need a better flu vaccine. The scientists are working on that. For now we need to make the best use we can of the ones we have.
Suzy, we are talking about mandatory vaccines for children aged 6 months and up. The studies on vaccinations in infants up to the age of 2 and vaccines shows that the vaccine worked as well as the placebo. That is where there is no evidence that they work for children under the age of two, the same age group that will be mandated to receive the vaccine, or else. At best, it shows that more research is needed, at worst it shows that there is no good reason at all to vaccinate this group.
Back to my comment regarding "should we mandate that all mothers breastfeed?" Because that would actually help and we know this but I think that most people recognize that we should not mandate behavior. I don't get why mandating vaccines is different. Your argument that we should mandate vaccines is not sound.
You really are an insolent little thang aren't you? I'll have you know that my familiarity with the fraud of statistics comes from my ex, who held a PhD in Statistical Sciences from UW Madison.
She could provide you statistical data that would show a 3% chance that the Sun wouldn't rise tomorrow. And I'm not being facetious here .... she showed me how you can take an identical data set and reach two totally opposing conclusions from the same baseline data. She said, whatever point or conclusion one wished to reach, it could be done easily, and that statistical analysis was more of an art, than a science .... to be precise ... an art, for bull sht artists.
This probably explains the two very familiar axioms "figures lie, and liars figure", and "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics".
Statistics are a common weapon used by those of questionable integrity, against those of equally questionable intelligence.
This is so true. We can't just rely on studies to tell us the whole story. Statistics can be manipulated and oftentimes the studies only support those conclusions that support the popular or mainstream view that vaccines are nothing but sunshine and roses. The studies that show a different side to the story do not get published. Scientists and researchers who have results or interpretations of the data that go against the mainstream view are quickly labeled as "Quacks". People don't think twice about getting their info from "pro vaccine" websites" but won't even look at a website that they deem as "anti-vaccine". It's not all as cut and dry as some like to pretend that it is. Based on what I know, I will not be getting a flu vaccine ever and neither will my children.
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