Originally Posted by
formeraa
I was vaccinated in October, caught something flu-like in early November and again in late December. I'm frankly tired of so-called experts saying that the vaccine was very effective and then quickly changed to "somewhat" effective. Frankly, they are simply making an educated guess with the flu shot.
As a graduate student working in virus pathogenesis and vaccine development (my work is with hemorrhagic but I did some with flu and encephalitic) I think I can respond to this. Do you have any idea the difficulty in making a vaccine? The flu vaccine that comes out every year is a pretty amazing achievement. They have to analyze an enormous amount of data from the satellite labs in Asia and try to predict out of all that data what is most likely to come here. This is months in advance. Can you tell me honestly everything that you are going to do and every person you will interact with in the coming months? From that point they need to start generating the vaccine (egg based still main supplier I believe), test it, and get it distributed before the flu 'season' here in the US. This is a fairly major accomplishment they do
every year.
People who complain about the protective nature don't fully understand the numbers. There is always the chance the vaccine given was predicted incorrectly making it nearly 0% effective against whatever emerging strain is actually hitting the US (think swine flu a few years back). That brings the number down. Then you have a certain percentage of the population which have a compromised immune system and either don't generate neutralizing antibodies or a weak response. This brings that % effectiveness down. So we come to that 50 to 60% effectiveness number. Ever heard of herd immunity? Even at 50 something percent, if
everyone got it then those who aren't protected won't have to worry about it as much as they are less likely to run into someone infected. It won't wipe out the flu (it still has animal reservoirs unlike polio and small pox) but it could consistently reduce the number of infections by hundreds of thousands of cases if not millions. Seems like a pretty big money game right there for businesses and people.
Considering how cheap, easy, and effective the vaccine is, I suggest everyone without an allergy or immune disorder get it. There is very little reason not to. And yes to your comment it may be an educated guess at effectiveness, but then so is most of life. If you had a 50% chance of winning the lottery, is it no longer worth it? And yet, somehow, the US is still at around 30 to 40% adult compliance. What a waste of a pretty awesome feat of science.
End Reading Rainbow - the more you know rant
