Flu shots aren’t good science

http://scott.wiersdorf.org/blarney/091024a.html

by scottw • 17 years ago

11 27 17 years ago

scott.wiersdorf.org

m_eiman• 17 years ago

I don't see the problem as a scientific one if the vaccine is effective against what is't supposed to be effective against.

If the problem is that "people" believe that a vaccine against one flu strain will protect them from getting sick from a variety of other viruses, it's a marketing problem.

gregwebs9• 17 years ago

People believe what their government tells them. In this case it is the CDC, recommending an influenza vaccine for everyone older than 6 months, and particularly for certain at risk groups. The CDC is representing the science as demonstrating a high effectiveness, which as these review articles point out, is not the case.

This is not just a problem of CDC marketing, though. As the Atlantic article points out, the scientists that are publishing research showing a lack of effectiveness in vaccines are not getting equal treatment among their peers who still believe them to effective.

carbocation4• 17 years ago

The CDC does not advertise high effectiveness. This seems to be a strawman you are knocking down. If you administer a fairly ineffective vaccine, you will still save hundreds of lives. With a very effective vaccine, you'd save even more.

phren0logy• 17 years ago

Not perfect, but better than nothing.

http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/10/journalists_si...

gregwebs9• 17 years ago

That is a whole lot of hand-waving mixed with name-calling to counteract the "story" of the Atlantic article. It basically agrees with the conclusions at the heart of the matter, though, that vaccination has not been proven in the elderly. However the blog seems pro vaccination for those under 50, unlike the Atlantic article.

Davertron• 17 years ago

Are there any negatives to getting the flu shot? For me, if there's a chance that it could prevent me getting the flu, and there are no potential negatives, then at least I may be prevented from certain strains.

llimllib• 17 years ago

Sometimes weakened strains of the flu can end up giving you symptoms of the actual flu. It costs money to get the flu shot. The needle could be infected. You could get in a car accident on the way to the clinic. You could pick up the flu from a previous visitor to the clinic.

All of which is to say, TANSTAAFL.

easp• 17 years ago

Generally, symptoms from a vaccine are mild compared to getting the full blown illness, so the upside is still there, even if you suffer the downside.

gregwebs9• 17 years ago

In the last swine flu vaccination (30 years ago), hundreds of Americans died from receiving the vaccine. You can find the sixty minutes episode on this online.

Vaccines usually come with other toxic substances that will be injected in your body.

The same research articles that show influenza vaccines aren't useful also indicate that the risk of severe side effects (such as death) are low. Those must be weighed against the benefits, which in the case of the influenza vaccine, seem to be mild or unproven.

carbocation4• 17 years ago

On a related note, the US stockpile of h1n1 vaccine has none of these other toxic substances (adjuvants, namely squalene) this time around. Most of the rest of the world uses them, and the side effect profile is either zero or minimal, depending on whom you ask.

ikitat3• 17 years ago

Hundreds? 48,161,019 Americans were vaccinated, 1098 cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) recorded nationwide by CDC surveillance, 532 of which were linked to the NIIP vaccination, resulting in death from severe pulmonary complications for 25 people

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza#1976_U.S._outbr...

camccann2• 17 years ago

If memory serves me, yearly flu vaccines are formulated based on predictions about which strains will be most common for a given season. Is it really a surprise that they guess wrong sometimes? Easy, 100%-accurate predictions don't really happen much in science outside of Physics 101 homework.

Also, is influenza vaccination really recommended for healthy adults, anyway? My impression was always that it was only worthwhile for people who would be at high risk from the disease.

As for the whole "it's all misguided groupthink, only a few brave people are sacrificing career success to speak truth to power" thing, I kinda have to roll my eyes. Maybe the author of the article is right, but most of the time when I've heard people say things like that, they don't actually understand the ideas they're criticizing and are being reflexively contrarian because that's a good way to make applause lights blink in the heads of their audience. Really, if most specialists in a field agree on something it's probably because it's true, and if you really think you've seen the light where everyone else has gone astray your point will be stronger if it stands on its own without the rah-rah anti-establishment social signalling.

kwantam• 17 years ago

I think your reflexive anti-reflexively contrarian reaction is blinding you to the point the author is trying to make. The politics surrounding questioning the flu shot, even within the medical research community, are such that Jackson et al were refused publication despite doing verifiably good scientific research.

From the Atlantic article (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1):

“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.”

Your career will be damaged if you question the efficacy of the flu shot, because it is current medical doctrine. This kind of thing has happened lots of times before, as the Atlantic article points out.

Really, if most specialists in a field agree on something it's probably because it's true

You're treading dangerously close to an argument from authority here. What surprises me about this is that I would guess from your writing that you've got enough experience under your belt to have realized that in every field, the average person is mediocre. This isn't some tautological nonsense; what I'm saying is that if you were told that "most programmers agree that X," your reaction would probably be "yeah, but most programmers are actually crap at their job, why would I listen to them?"

You'd be right in that case, and you'd be right if you replaced programmers with doctors in the above. That most doctors believe in the flu shot isn't a reflection of the flu shot's greatness so much as a reflection of their training to that effect. Coupled with strong political forces pushing current doctrine, you have a situation where scientific research is being systematically subverted.

camccann2• 17 years ago

Yes, it's obviously true that anyone going stubbornly against established consensus will get in hot water. This is the case whether their position is correct or incorrect. In the first case, they're heroes; in the latter case, they're crackpots. It's rarely obvious to people outside the field which is which, and there's a lot more of the latter.

The contrarianism that I object to is when people who don't have enough expertise in the field to tell good ideas from bad seem to hold up going against consensus as somehow inherently noble, because most of the time they're just going to be encouraging the crackpots. This especially includes anything that glorifies the Galileo-esque "persecuted genius" archetype.

Argument from authority is completely valid when the cited authority is authoritative on the subject under consideration. If someone justifies a statement about algorithms with "because Knuth said so" and can cite where he said it, that's a pretty solid basis to go on. The very nature of science is such that "widely held consensus of recognized experts" is the ultimate authority on current knowledge. This is not a guarantee of correctness, but it's a strong argument that it's the most likely, reliable answer we have and there's almost never a good reason for people outside the field to reject such consensus.

The programming analogy falls down a bit in that the bar is somewhat lower for being considered "a programmer" than it is for being a reputable specialist in most scientific fields. If you narrow it enough to filter out the kind of "programmers" who fail FizzBuzz exercises, I expect you'd find that anything that 95% of them agree on is, in fact, far more correct than random chance.

You and I have enough knowledge of programming to be able to evaluate good vs. bad arguments, and can probably identify lots of places where common wisdom is suboptimal. But what would you tell someone who knows nothing about programming but needs to know how to evaluate ideas about programming? Sure, we know that most programmers are stuck in a rut coding in Blub, but someone outside the field can't tell the difference between "overly structured programming is just obfuscation to create job security, simplify things and use gotos for flow control" and "use first-class functions to make code more expressive and eliminate redundancy".

We'd all roll our eyes at the guy promoting goto statements as a route to more effective programming, right? Well, us dismissing "use more gotos" would look, to someone outside the field, exactly how doctors' reaction to the flu shot issue looks to you.

bcl• 17 years ago

The title is completely inaccurate.

slpsys• 17 years ago

Hot News: Bullshit Metascience Calls Bullshit on Science.

"Odds are, it has." If you're going to call out research as pseudoscience, don't write unvalidated statements like this.

Flu shots aren’t good science

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