Posted on 02/16/2018 9:22:52 AM PST by spintreebob
The flu vaccine is more effective than expected, federal health officials said on Thursday at a special news conference held to discuss the dangerous flu season, which is expected to kill more than 50,000 Americans.
This year’s vaccine is about 25% effective against the H3N2 strain of flu that is causing most illnesses and deaths, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Per the NYT. But look at the AP story.
The flu vaccine is doing a poor job protecting older Americans and others against the bug that’s causing most illnesses.
Preliminary figures released Thursday suggest the vaccine is 36% effective overall in preventing flu illness severe enough to send a patient to the doctor’s office.
https://apnews.com/84f1b7bf62ae47c28a8c82f0cb53bcdd/Flu-shot-only-36-percent-effective,-making-bad-year-worse
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
You would if you were able to steer your car into the bushes instead of a brick wall.
Flu vaccine BOMBSHELL: 630% more “aerosolized flu virus particles” emitted by people who received flu shots… flu vaccines actually SPREAD the flu
That’s comparing apples to oranges.
A 25% effective rate for a flu vaccine still saves thousands of lives.
Please. Natural news is not any kind of a scientific journal. I’ve administered thousands of vaccines in a dozen species. Such ridiculous articles fly in the face of common sense and sanity.
That is hardly a good comparison. There is no downside to getting a flu shot, other than a small expense and a sore arm for a day. I have asthma, and when I get sick, it goes straight to my lungs. I always get a flu shot. 36% is better than nothing.
“Please. Natural news is not any kind of a scientific journal. “
Please. your argument is BS! since Natural news did not do the study and links to the study are provided in the article.
Thanks for the ping! Although they do what they can. The reality is that there is a lot of guesswork involved.
“The findings in this report are subject to at least four limitations.
First, vaccination status included self-report at four of five sites. End-of-season VE estimates based on updated documentation of vaccination status might differ from interim estimates. Second, information from medical records and immunization registries is needed to evaluate VE by vaccine type and for fully vaccinated versus partially vaccinated children, as well as to evaluate the effects of previous season vaccination and timing of vaccination; end-of-season analysis of VE by vaccine type and effects of partial or previous season vaccination is planned. Third, an observational study design has greater potential for confounding and bias relative to randomized clinical trials. However, the test-negative design is widely used in VE studies and has been used by the U.S. Flu VE Network to estimate VE for previous influenza seasons. Finally, small sample sizes in some age groups resulted in wide confidence intervals, and end-of-season VE estimates could change as additional patient data become available or if there is a change in circulating viruses late in the season. It is also important to note that the VE estimates in this report are limited to the prevention of outpatient medical visits rather than more severe illness outcomes, such as hospitalization or death; data from studies measuring VE against more severe outcomes will be available at a later date.”
The senior author of the study says people are mis-interpreting the findings.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/16/flu-shot-wont-make-you-spread-more-influenza/
One is referring to its effectiveness in stopping the flu completely, the other from stopping severe cases of it.
This is an idiotic misinterpretation. Contact the lead author for a dose of common sense. The worst flu pandemic, the 1918 Spanish flu, killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, and 650000 in the US. There was no vaccine at the time, not even the recognition of a virus. The natural news guy is a hustler selling his product. The paper is about people with clinical cases of flu. You people need to get a grip. Not everybody is out to get you. This is not Africa where the natives follow a different gender of medicine.
Once again, the corrupt old media empire is fueling the fire with lies and ignorance.
Thanks for your interesting reply.
I may be immune to the 1918 flu that killed my Dad’s Brother and made my Dad very sick, due to the DNA, my Dad passed on to me after he survived the 1918 flu.
In fact many of us may have viruses that were millions of years in the making in our DNA:
I have some ancestors, whom we can track down to the late 1600’s to early 1700’s, who lived past 80 to even 100. Often our women weren’t as lucky with multiple children, resulting in deaths during the births and up to a couple of years of bad health after giving birth and finally dying.
Those long living ancestors may have had virus DNA passed on, which enabled them to survive. The life span picked back up for those born years before the Civil war. Again, many lived into their 90’s or 100’s into the 1920/30’s.
Those born right before, during or shortly after the Civil war often had shorter life spans. Some of the men, who fought in the war ended up with what is now called PTSD.
This impacted them emotionally and economically. Most never made it past their late 50’s/early 60’s. Their wives often died young, in spite of having ancestors with longer life spans.
The women on both sides our families born about or shortly after WWI for the most part have outlived their husbands by at least a decade. We feel that the Great Depression had similar negative impacts more on our men of working ages as our civil war had on their male ancestors.
Both men and women in our families are now making it to 80 and 80/90 plus with fairly good health or with problems that good medicine/surgery and doctors are helping them/us to feel better and have more enjoyable life spans.
May you live to 110, my Aunt Blanch lived to 106. Michealangelo and his father both lived to 90 during a time when the Bubonic Plague wiped out half of Europe.
Thank you and the same to you.
Seems like each week, we find out more about what our DNA could contain for with us.
That is the great unexplored universe in each one of us, our own DNA with its good things and sometimes not so good.
“The vaccine is effective at causing the flu in weak subjects.”
The flu shot contains a dead virus. How exactly does a dead virus infect you?
Vaccination works by the principle of herd immunity. Getting the shot is no guarantee that any particular individual is protected, whether getting the shot or not. What it does do is greatly reduce the chain of transmission, helping to limit the ability of an outbreak to spread throughout a population.
Some people who get the shot will still get the flu, especially if they were already exposed before getting the vaccine. It takes two weeks for your body to get the full benefit of the vaccine, it’s not an instantaneous effect.
So far as populations are concerned, perhaps. But for individuals it works by stimulating production of antibodies. It's been shown to be effective in many instances. The "herd immunity" thing is kind of like gun ownership. I don't own a gun because my wife is suspicious of them, but the fact that a large number of other people own one helps keep me safe from crime thanks to the deterrent effect of not knowing who is armed and who isn't.
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The vaccine contains more than 50 live viri.
The “dead virus” canard has been shown to be nonsensical. Viri do not possess any property of life; they are replicated by living organisms that host them.
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The “dead virus” canard has been shown to be nonsensical. Viri do not possess any property of life; they are replicated by living organisms that host them.
While it's true a virus is not "alive" as the word is typically defined, the flu vaccine is made not from "live viri". You are right to say viruses aren't alive, so it's obvious you can't be right to say "The vaccine contains more than 50 live viri".
I worked for 3 years making flu vaccine, I know how it's made. Basically, to not be too technical, the virus (a particular strain thereof, well really 2 or 3 of the suspected most common for the next year) are torn apart (via a chemical reaction) and these virus "parts" (if you will) are then put into the vaccine. These parts of the virus are what cause an immune response, conferring (at least theoretically) immunity on the recipient.
The flu vaccine is typically described as "not containing a live virus" for this reason. Because it doesn't contain a whole virus, only parts of it, again intended to cause an immune response without actually having any danger of infection. The virus "parts" that are in flu vaccine are essentially "dead' (although as you correctly state, viruses aren't ever "alive", by the strict definition of "life" typically used in biology). The point is, the flu vaccine doesn't use a whole virus particle, unlike other vaccines for other viral infections that may (the early vaccines for small pox come to mind, that used a variant of the small pox virus, but still a virus that could potentially cause infection, just a less severe infection known as cow pox).
So it's true the flu vaccine doesn't cause the flu, it can't, unless the entire biological theory of germ theory is wrong.
What most likely happened this year were probably a comedy of errors. First, the particular strains this year that were most common were probably particularly virulent. Second, the strains that ended up being the most common were probably not what was predicted the previous year when the flu vaccine for this year was being produced. So, for those reasons, the vaccine wasn't as effective as other years. It's nothing more mysterious than that.
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I should have said “active.”
(and they deiinitely are active, or they would not have been used)
The purpose of vaccination is to create disease and havoc.
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