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The flu vaccine gives you only a 10% increase in defending you from the flu. That is if the vaccine doesn't give you the flu.

CaptainShuddup says

The flu vaccine gives you only a 10% increase in defending you from the flu. That is if the vaccine doesn't give you the flu.

Not true:

a study by Bridges et al (2000) among healthy adults found that the inactivated influenza vaccine was 86% effective against laboratory-confirmed influenza, but only 10% effective against all respiratory illnesses in the same population and season.

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/vaccination/effectivenessqa.htm

"respiratory illness" is a generic term which includes pneumonia, the common cold, cancer, and a host of other illnesses which have nothing in common with influenza.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_disease

The flu vaccine is however up to86% effective against LABORATORY CONFIRMED cases of influenza.

We live in a blizzard of viruses more or less constantly. Diagnosing them individually is lengthy and expensive. By the time they are diagnosed, the symptoms have usually resolved spontaneously or they have done their damage. That's why viral entities are seldom cultured, tested and analyzed in individual cases. You are just given generic instructions to rest, push fluids and take analgesics.

Only if you have complications or serious pneumonia may you actually be hospitalized and tested.

That is why viral illnesses remain mysterious for the most part, and talk about them is a tower of babel. People are always calling viruses something other than what they are i.e. cold, flus etc. when they might be variants of any number of viral pathogens.

Most people and doctors don't know what they have specifically unless they show general symptoms of a known, tested and diagnosed epidemic.

APOCALYPSEFUCKisShostikovitch says

When my mother was a girl, influenza deaths were really common. Her father was orphaned by an influenza outbreak in the 19 century. This was not an unusual story for the day. Trust me, the WHO's 113 labs that report into the annual flu protocol aren't working for 10% reductions. The vaccination schema that has evolved over the decades models for response against three or sometimes four flu strains, depending on what the labs pick up during the execution of the seasonal protocol.

Are the tea party nuts spreading Koched data now on the fucking flu shot?

While I agree that it can be a useful vaccine for the right person, esp. if targeting the right strain(s), you have to consider this: Per CDC "only 8.5 percent of all pneumonia and influenza deaths and only 2.1 percent of all respiratory and circulatory deaths are influenza related". That doesn't tell you much, but the mortality rate depends heavily on the age group and the years strain(s), and is overall around 15 per 100000 for influenza and pneumonia (so probably far less than 10 for influenza alone as pneumonia is more common). Serious adverse events are roughly 4 per 1 million (very conservative numbers), if you vaccinate the whole bay area you will get around 30 serious adverse events. That is roughly the amount of estimated flu related deaths you will get this season where the strain is more virulent and lethal. There is no way to know what the ideal cut-off point of number of vaccinations is, and how may would get sick and die if everybody was vaccinated in addition to the SAE. Plus, the "young and healthy" age group often has related deaths less than 0.1 per 100000 which is well below the number of SAE.

Another way to look at it is that roughly 50% of americans get the flu shot, which would be 150 million. In 2010 there were 500 related deaths, let's say they were all part of the non-vaccinated 150 million. That would be roughly 3 deaths per 1 million which is well below the rate of SAEs of which - granted - not many die, but often cause long-term disabilities and require long-term care. And it is unlikely that out of those 500 deaths there were none within the vaccinated population.

All of this does not take into account chronic issues following vaccinations which are notoriously hard to track and confirm. To sum it up the flu shot is far from a clear-cut, no brainer, and it makes definitely more sense to identify and vaccinate high-risk people than blindly vaccinate the whole country as this is a highly mutating virus that you cannot eradicate through mass-innoculation. Also if people at high risk of exposure and in general would wear masks when appropriate and follow safety guidelines for contact with other people the infection rate could probably be brought down much more without additional vaccination.

True, the herd immunity may protect those as well who didn't get vaccinated or can't due to underlying conditions because they are less likely to get infected if less people catch it overall. However, even people who don't get a full outbreak due to vaccinations can be carriers. No specific insights into smallpox, but smallpox was a great success for vaccination due to its very low mutation rate. Same goes for most bacteria-caused serious illnesses such as tetanus or diphteria, but a highly-mutating virus such as the flu virus is a different beast. They may be able one day to cut the vaccine production times to a fraction and can react immediately to mutations and vaccinate "on demand" against the flu with synthetic peptide vaccines which are clearly the future. They will also eliminate the need for preservatives and most adjuvants and reduce risk of contamination and toxic side effects, which will be a game changer not only for flu-vaccination.

Health care topic ? I blame Obamacare.

Btw. while I don't get myself vaccinated (yet), I opted for the traditional shot for the youngster. While the modern flu-mist doesn't contain thimerosal (preservative), it is live-attenuated (sheds to others for up to 3 weeks) and as a nasal spray way to close to the blood-brain barrier IMO.

This is exactly what I am talking about. Get people to be focused on the flu, whether in fear or resistance to the vaccine, and no one focuses
On the fact that hospitals are killing up to 440,000 people a year.

So, because people are allegedly killed as a result of medical malpractice, it's the fault of the Affordable Care Act? I'm sure that prior to 2014, there were no deaths as a result of medical malpractice.

ugh.

A hospital in Massachusetts apparently exposed more than 400 patients to HIV and Hepatitis

For 2 years Salem Hospital in Massachusetts was risking exposing people to HIV and hepatitis if they received IV medications in that hospital.

Nearly 450 people were potentially infected thanks to this extreme carelessness.

9 Patients Reported Dead in Oregon After Nurse Allegedly Injected Them With Tap Water Instead of Medication

Police in Medford, Oregon, are investigating a nurse at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center after several patients died after the nurse allegedly ejected them with tap water instead of their prescribed medication.

NBC affiliate KGW 8 News reported that a nurse assigned to the ICU at Asante Rogue Reginal Medical Center replaced a patient’s fentanyl medication with tap water, which resulted in several patients dying from deadly infections.

Hospital sources told KOBI 5, “Tap water, which isn’t sterile, led to multiple infections of Pseudomonas.”

Dr. Robin Miller, who hosts KOBI’s Docs on Call series, shared, “It could cause sepsis, pneumonia. It could infect all the organs. So it can be a very severe infection.”

Consider “Joan Morris”, age 67, who was admitted for evaluation and treatment of a brain aneurysm. She was resting after a procedure when she was abruptly taken off by mistake — over her own protests! — to have invasive cardiac testing followed by placement of a pacemaker / defibrillator.

A root cause analysis described in Annals of Internal Medicine found 17 separate errors had to happen for “Joan Morris” to get the cardiac procedure meant for “Jane Morrison.”