If there is selective pressure preventing spread, mutation would seem inevitable. Covid has mutated many times already. The question is will the mutations this selects for make a flu that is worse or will does it wall off all possible mutations with 100% (or close to) certainty?
Mutations are inevitable no matter what. Many viruses mutate extremely quickly, probably because they are much simpler than a bacteria - that's why many vaccines stop working in a matter of months. While you're right about selective pressure giving preference to some strains, by limiting the spread of a virus you limit its potential to mutate since there are so many fewer viral particles around.
For example if 100 people get sick vs 10, the number of viral particles and mutations you can expect increases tenfold and the risk of one of those mutations being dangerous increases as well.
One of my friends older sisters, in her late 20's came down with the flu at night, then in the morning didn't go to school (she was a teacher) b/c she was sick. She went to the hospital that evening and was dead before midnight from inflammation of the heart caused by the Flu.
That is heartbreaking for sure. I think OP is trying to say or raise the possibility that the alternative could be much worse on a population level scale. I certainly have the same question but no background in this area to know myself.
I think there is a good faith discussion though to be had about whether or not this could select for more deadly traits, no? That is certainly my first uneducated but good faith question that comes to mind after the past few years we’ve all been through.
> there is a good faith discussion though to be had about whether or not this could select for more deadly traits, no
In the history of vaccination, has this ever happened?
What has happened is resistance to medicine. Vaccines reduce the opportunity for pathogens to be exposed to drugs by reducing the incidence and severity of illness.
It’s fine to take time to make informed medical decisions. But if your concern is resistance, vaccines are a friend.
Different flu strains have affected different age groups. For example, the 1918 flu pandemic killed 25-50 million people and disproportionately affected young adults: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
Anti orthodoxy isn’t necessarily the same as anti science. Questioning the established science is pro science provided it’s done in good faith and it looks like the parent is acting in good faith.
What you’re witnessing is a great reckoning for the scientific community. We’ll see if the orthodoxy still has the faculties to deliver truth with time. I think the community has been corrupted.
> Questioning the established science is pro science provided it’s done in good faith and it looks like the parent is acting in good faith.
I see the opposite here, it's another take of outrage porn based on misinformation.
Good science would be having a hypothesis and doing scientific research on it. Science is based on hypothesis. It rarely gets to 100% but does work off of statistical significance. Whereas conspiracy theory regurgitation is based on opinion and story telling and does little to nothing to move science forward.
Asking questions is the start of the scientific process. If it turns out that vaccines cause undisclosed health problems then wouldn’t you be outraged too?
Let’s see how it unfolds. Most of us can’t do the science ourselves, but we can ask questions and observe.
> Perhaps the only reason why flu is harmless is because we don't fight it?
Without providing any evidence that viruses tend to become more dangerous when we combat them is anti-science. It's like saying: What if the earth is flat?
Consider successful viral eradication campaigns like smallpox or polio. There's no indication that smallpox became "super smallpox" as it was about to be eradicated. Nor is there a reason to think this would happen based on what we know about how viruses work. It's pure fear mongering on the basis of nothing at all.
Edit: There's so much wrong with the original post here. Not only is the flu sometimes deadly, as others have pointed out, but we already fight the flu with seasonal flu vaccines. Indeed, they seem to have a strong protective effect[1]. The flu doesn't seem to be getting stronger as a result any of this.
That’s not very kind. I think maybe you just don’t agree with me. It doesn’t mean I’m not here in good faith. I’ve been a member here since 2012 and most of my comments are well received. Those that are not are still my truthful opinions stated plainly.
I don’t expect people to engage with me, but I hope they do, and with their heart. Telling people to flag and move on feels like you just want to silence perspectives you don’t like.
> Perhaps the only reason why flu is harmless is because we don't fight it?
The flu has been fought with vaccines for decades.
Still, it mutates constantly and the vaccine producers guess which strains will be dominant. Like s coin flip, they guess right or wrong. The topic of the article means that they may not have to guess.
> ...antibiotic resistance issues we are facing due to dishing out antibiotics...
Vaccines and antibiotics are two completely different things. One is preventative, other is for acute care of a bacterial infection.
> Other than very old and frail people it's stupid to vaccinate against something that harms 0% non-old and non-weak population.
Vaccine of a healthy person slows transmission to elderly and immunocompromised. And reduces the chances of feeling really shitty and missing school or work for several days.
It's sad to dismiss something because it doesn't benefit "me", without considering how it may benefit "us" as a community.
There are many examples in history (and in our modern world) where doing the "selfless" thing is just manipulation for serving someone else's interests first.
Religious leaders maintained power over society for ages by determining what was selfish behavior.
We likely cannot agree on a rule which always properly distinguishes between pursuing self interest for survival's sake versus crossing the line into harming others. Since we are forced to inhabit the same world, it's best to not disparage others for pursuing their own self interest as long as they aren't hurting you directly.
"Poison" is hyperbole but I read it as ego. Coming from an exclusively ego-centric place generally doesn't lead to the best outcomes in life.
Unchecked ego is part of narcissism spectrum. We all have some of it. Extreme narcissism is a cancer in modern culture. Maybe that's what OP meant by poison.
The poison I meant is the difference between communal animals and human society. The root of why we are so noxious and odious a beast is the self, and a lack of realization the self doesn’t exist as it’s impermanent and ever changing. But I give away my doctrine here :-)
I appreciate the perspective. If the self doesn't exist outside of our consciousness, while also being the most important and valued thing, it is quite the paradox of independence.
Human society has a wide variety of cultural norms around this too. Being banished from the group into the wilderness was a death sentence in recent human history. It kept people in check and helped with survival of the group.
Now we have instant access to life's needs and wants to the point where we take each other for granted. Our independent spirit can be a curse if taken too far. It's part of our DNA to need each other. For example a newborn can die if unheld for too long.
The motivating example here was the statement of “I’m not going to be hurt by disease X so I will do nothing to prevent harm to others who are impacted by the diseases spread.” This isn’t self interest. This is selfishness. They gain nothing by helping others than avoiding minor inconveniences.
I would also note that major religions revolve on explaining the differences and providing a vantage for judging the boundaries between self interest and selfishness. The fact some selfish people exploit the ambiguities, or even the inefficiencies of selflessness does not obviate in any way the teaching of the religion. Just demonstrates that pursuing a selfless life doesn’t imply lack of critical thought.
The statement appears to have been that use of vaccines will contribute to antibiotic resistance, and the counterpoint being that vaccines are not antibiotics and thus irrelevant. What is incorrect about this?
The orignal statement was actually "antibiotic resistance issues we are facing due to dishing out antibiotics left and right", which is pretty clearly not "use of vaccines will contribute to antibiotic resistance".
But that is the point being made. These two are not similar.
Antibiotics are a general purpose thing. Using them on trivial cases can increase antibiotic resistance which is bad for the cases where we really need antibiotics.
Vaccines are specific. You can't accrue "vaccine resistance" as a catch all thing by applying vaccines to everyone. You may create pressure for a virus to work around specific vaccines, but the only risk is that we will need to adjust the vaccine. Unlike with antibiotics where we really just need to try and find a new alternative.
Antibotics make a given person more resistant to the current version of the bacteria. Bacteria with a mutation that survives against that antibiotic will then become the dominant version because it massively out-competes the rest.
Vaccines make a given person more resistant to the version of the virus the vaccine was for. Viruses with a "vaccine escape" mutation will become the dominant version because it massively out-competes the rest.
Personally I think this is what happened with Delta. It was first identified in Oct 2020, but didn't become dominant until the vaccine rollouts, which it was better able to survive against.
No this is not the same. Antibiotics kill bacteria, across the board, indiscriminately. Bacteria can evolve protection from antibiotics. It is not clear that this will help out compete the rest. Taking antibiotics for a minor cold can cause antibiotic resistance to appear in OTHER bacteria unrelated to the cold.
This is the second time you've posted a link to wikipedia that you don't seem to really understand. Yes, it is true that there are narrow spectrum antibiotics. However, it is normative to assume that broad spectrum antibiotics are the things we refer to when we refer to antibiotics in the context of overuse fostering antibiotic resistance. You can't blindly give narrow spectrum antibiotics and expect it to do anything. It's the broad spectrum stuff that you see everywhere. Things like cattle especially.
The fact that there are other more niche types of antibiotics doesn't materially change anything about the argument being made here.
And that is not really a big deal at all. We can just adjust the vaccines for the next dominant strain. We cannot simply adjust antibiotics when we facilitate antibiotic resistance by using them for trivial cases.
Read more carefully. You can accrue resistance to a specific vaccine. You cannot accrue resistance to vaccines, generally. The rate of people taking the Flu vaccine has no bearing on the efficacy of the Covid vaccine (in terms of vaccine resistance).
Also, you have linked to a section on antivirals. These are different from vaccines.
> You cannot accrue resistance to vaccines, generally.
You're the only one who suggested this, and I assumed you knew enough to give your ambigious statement the benefit of the doubt. I'm guessing your were confused due to the misunderstanding about general-purpose antibiotics.
There are many, not just one, for the different strains of flu. The yearly shots include only a small subset, the ones predicted to be most prevalent in the coming flu season, because of manufacturing costs/limitations and compatibility.
Thats what happens if you overpressure people. I can definitely say that since the pandemic, and especially the hardcore propaganda during the first few waves, I can feel a distinct revoltion when someone pulls the "it is for the good of others" card. I can only watch my own gut reactions. No, thanks, I am not going to take medicine with questionable test status for "us". Maybe I might have without that hardcore pressure, but I will never forget the media running wild. I know I should feel differently, but I dont. I am through with "us".
Okay. But what you say has nothing to do with the scientific value and benefits. It’s just your gut feelings. You are free to feel that of course, to each their own
I think the time of "blindly trusting science" is actually over. Also, invoking science and the statistical benefits of a effectively-forced medical intervention isn't really helping to rebuild trust. Dont get me wrong, I love science. Science alone. Without the media, uninformed journalists, and all the yada yada. I dont trust these people anymore to communicate facts without distoring them. Also, I work at a university, so I actually know that not every scientist is actually a genius. So, knowing that media distort information, and knowing that scientists have to publish, no matter what, does not help build trust in scientific data used to pressure people into compliance.
IOW, there are two kind of science. There is the science we have learnt to depend on. And then there is reality, liars and media.
I totally get that. The COVID vaccines were marketed as our hope for the end of the pandemic. But people with vaccines kept getting sick afterwards. There was definitely an overpromise and the messaging throughout the pandemic seemed completely "make it up as you go."
At the same time there was and still is hardcore political propaganda to divide us into "us" and "them" camps on topics like this. It makes everyone on both sides more easily controlled and manipulated. Being through with "us" puts you into the "them" camp and your decision is equally shaped by the other side of the same propaganda. Are you really looking out for "me" or serving someone else's agenda just the way they want you to?
One can decide to skip vaccines and still watch out for their neighbors, they aren't mutually exclusive.
Camus' book The Rebel is a fascinating read on the topic. This quote stuck with me over the years:
"Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic. In the purely historical universe that they
have chosen, rebellion and revolution end in the same dilemma: either police rule or insanity."
The Antibiotic resistance issues were seeing are orders of magnitude less problematic than the deaths caused by bacteria pre antibiotics. And - the flu isn't 100% safe for non old and non "weak" - no clue where you got that impression from. The 1918 flu pandemic (the origin of the still circulating h1n1 strain) was among the deadliest pandemics ever exactly because it was most likely to kill yound, healthy people
The problem isn't the current state of resistance - the problem is the growing state of antibiotic resistance. What happens when the trend continues and we no longer have useful antibiotics? Then we're right back to square one.
They were drawing a comparison. Overuse of antibiotics can lead to antibiotic resistance; and similarly, in some cases we get similar results with antivirals.
Sure, but an antiviral is not a vaccine, so I'm not sure what the comparison is there. And it's not like there's no technological path on the horizon to deal with Antibiotic resistance- its probably an underfunded area of research but the situation is very very far from apocalyptic. The bubonic plague was apocalyptic- but antibiotics are pretty effective against that
...prepare yourself for massive downvotes. I'm in the same boat - how can I possibly be 'anti vax' if I've gotten pretty much all the PREVIOUS ones (based on the older tech), and I'm just skeptical of the utility/necessity of this new tech that appears to have non-trivial risks of debilitating or fatal side effects?
That's because the phrase anti-vax is not meant to be an accurate descriptor; instead, it's meant to be a label applied to you to cause others to attack you without thinking. You can see many examples of this here in this thread.
Be comfortable in your control over your own body and don't engage with those who would destroy you because you don't submit to their collective will.
Employers (mostly in Blue strongholds) were EXTREMELY EAGER to fire people - even remote employees - who did not want to submit paperwork showing they took the vaccine. If you refused, they marked you 'refusenik' and you were let go anyway.
At the time I wrote this comment, there are literally two occurrences of the term “anti-vax” in this thread and they belong to you and the grandparent.
> it's meant to be a label applied to you to cause others to attack you without thinking
I would like to think the average attitude here is closer to one of intellectual curiosity than blind labeling.
The trouble is that "anti-vax" sentiment is impossible to distinguish from "vaccine hesitancy" when the only reasons put forward seem to be vague mistrust in the tech / government.
Rarely do these conversations lead to real discussions about actual quantified risks, which makes it easy to dismiss hesitancy as garden variety anti-vax sentiment - the kind that is based on verifiable lies and has been around for decades.
I'd argue that instead of predicting inevitable binary thinking and dismissals, it'd be more useful to focus on the actual substantial claims to back up the position. Anything less moves the conversation nowhere.
There are no credible reports of mrna vaccines having undesirable side effects any more serious than other vaccines. All vaccines are a trade off between side effects and effects, that’s why there are a huge number of hurdles before any vaccine is released and lots of studies of efficacy and side effects after.
That’s what I thought too, until a friend sent me the paper “Class switch towards non-inflammatory, spike-specific IgG4 antibodies after repeated SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination” published a few weeks ago:
From what I can understand, it seems mRNA vaccines can cause a non-inflammatory response to actual infection that prolongs the disease. I’m supportive of vaccination, but that doesn’t mean side effects can’t happen especially with new technology.
Oh, there's more. Remember all those refutations of claims that it changes your DNA? Pretty much all of them went something like "That's stupid, DNA is converted into RNA, not the other way around!" - meanwhile the people who were concerned about it knew about reverse transcriptase enzyme, and months later a study was published showing it can happen in human liver cells: https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73
> PCR on genomic DNA of Huh7 cells exposed to BNT162b2 amplified the DNA sequence unique to BNT162b2. Our results indicate a fast up-take of BNT162b2 into human liver cell line Huh7, leading to changes in LINE-1 expression and distribution. We also show that BNT162b2 mRNA is reverse transcribed intracellularly into DNA in as fast as 6 h upon BNT162b2 exposure.
They showed it actually happening in extracted human liver cells in a lab, not in a live human. That would be the next step. But in the meantime the "genomic DNA" part does sound like it made a permanent change to those cells.
Two authors of the Lund University study, Associate Professor Yang de Marinis and Professor Magnus Rasmussen, have also released a Q&A in response to the attention their work has generated on social media.
“The results have in many cases been misinterpreted,” they said.
“This study does not investigate whether the Pfizer vaccine alters our genome,” de Marinis confirmed.
Prof Rasmussen also stated: “There is no reason for anyone to change their decision to take the vaccine based on this study.”
The study was conducted in a laboratory on cells in a petri dish, which is not the same as a study on human subjects because “cell lines differ from cells in living organisms,” Rasmussen wrote.
Dr Parry also said the Huh7 cell line is very different from healthy human cells.
“Huh-7 is an immortal, tumorigenic cell line,” he said. “This is barely an appropriate system to make any claims of in healthy persons.”
FWIW, not all governments even promote the flu vaccine for everyone. For example, here in the UK the flu vaccine is only offered to the elderly and to those who have conditions such as asthma that makes it more dangerous (and indeed that also applies to ongoing boosters of the covid vaccine). For those whom flu is dangerous, a more effective vaccine seems like a very good thing.
Right. "advised" would probably have been better wording than "offered". Within those critiria they'll actively contact you and suggest that you get it. Outside of those criteria you have to ask for it yourself.
I need to book my appointment as they texted me. I can only remember getting flu once, in my 20s, and it felt like I was going to die. 25 years later I’m gonna avoid the flu like the plague!
The politicization of vaccination may be a real phenomena, but that does not change the value of vaccination or the decades of foundational work that occurred prior to the popularity of anti-vax sentiment.
What leads you to believe that the political noise is worth listening to despite a history of successful vaccine development? Many anti-vaxxers are equally opposed to MMR/Polio/etc. vaccines despite the risk profile of those diseases. What separates "new" vaccine hesitation from the classical quackery?
If we always change our viewpoints about health because someone chooses to politicize some of them, we're going to be in for a bad time...
I'm genuinely curious to understand this sentiment. I grew up with anti-vax parents in the 80s, and was lucky enough to experience the measles first-hand as a result. If I could undo that period of my life and protect myself against getting sick, I would.
When I see people express skepticism based on nothing other than the current political climate, it's hard not to see the blind mistrust my parents had in the government that ultimately caused me real harm.
Your skepticism is warranted and perhaps a healthy view to the modern approach to what they call science. Labeling people for being anti-vax because they are anti-mRNA vax is cancel culturalism at its peak.
Keep in mind that an alarming number of people who are pro covid vax are the same people who were anti-vaxxers when they believed it was the cause of autism.
I’m not going to downvote because it's your opinion but I don't see why you would be concerned about a vaccine at all u less you've a proven history of adverse effects which is so extraordinarily rare it's barely worth mentioning!
I think though that the kind of opinion you have and share really diminishes the incredible amount of hard work, research and effort that goes into them.
It doesn't matter whether it's political or not. All that matters is the science, and the real risk and benefits shown by science. The danger is that too many so-called "skeptics" are not actually looking at the science, and are instead sitting in fear and ignorance and calling that skepticism, when really it's the same thinking that they would claim to reject in others.
If you're concerned about the disease, get the vaccine. Vaccines work, and you literally cannot predict with certainty how a disease will affect you. If you're concerned about the vaccine, look at the scientific evidence after large-scale trials. At the end of the day, you aren't personally doing the trials and developing the vaccine, so you will have to have some level of faith in the work of others. Same as you need to have faith that your vegetables aren't covered in e.coli, or that your shower isn't harboring brain-eating viruses, etc. We all take measured risks in life.
When the concept of vaccination was new, it was political.
After a few rounds of stopping really bad disease (smallpox, polio, rabies, etc...), people mostly believed in vaccine because they literally eradicated disease. When COVID hit, I think it benefited from the reputations of successful vaccines of the past, and a lot of people put their faith in public health officials who in the past were the vanguard for eradicating some very dreadful, horrible viral diseases.
After getting couple doses of COVID vax, actually having everyone in my family (who is vaxed) including me get COVID (and some of us get seriously ill), I have a very hard time believing that the COVID vaccination was very effective, especially if you compare it to the vaccinations that have successfully eradicated entire diseases. Millions have shared the same experience my family had.
Yes, desperate times call for sometimes desperate measures, and I like to believe that the COVID vaccine helped blunt the pandemic... but the fact is people get this vaccination and still can get COVID and even die of die of it. This is the source of the cognitive dissonance we see in the body politic right now... and why trust in public health is down substantially.
It seems like you got it in your head that the COVID vaccines would be a able to stop infection entirely, and were disappointed when it didn't for your family. It's not surprising that you did: a lot of the messaging at the time really counted their chickens before they hatched and painted it as a miracle prophylactic. In the real world, vaccines are a population-level tool with a range of outcomes. It's annoyingly hard to communicate that to the masses.
In practice, it turns out that fighting fast-mutating viral respiratory infections is hard to do. Our immune just aren't that great at it, and vaccines can only stack the deck there so much in our favor. I believe that the (observational, hard to rely on) evidence suggests that the covid vaccine reduced the incidence of infection, but only by about 25-50%. And that's good! That doesn't even cover the much more substantial reduction in serious outcomes! A world with the vaccines is unarguably less hostile than that without. But it's not a miracle, and it's always aggravating when people engage in the nirvana fallacy about it.
> It's not surprising that you did: a lot of the messaging at the time really counted their chickens before they hatched and painted it as a miracle prophylactic.
This is exactly the issue. There was so much just bad information out there.
> Our immune just aren't that great at it, and vaccines can only stack the deck there so much in our favor. I believe that the (observational, hard to rely on) evidence suggests that the covid vaccine reduced the incidence of infection, but only by about 25-50%.
I like to think this .
> A world with the vaccines is unarguably less hostile than that without. But it's not a miracle, and it's always aggravating when people engage in the nirvana fallacy about it.
It's really disappointing that attitudes towards COVID vaccines are spreading to other vaccines. It's sad when I hear parents talking about MMR and other proved vaccines using the anti-COVID talking pointes.
> I’m skeptical ...now that vaccination has become political.
I'm exactly the opposite -- I'm skeptical of skepticism like yours, because its source often seems to be political / tribal rather than rational. Specifically, it seems to me that some people have started pushing the anti-vax narrative because they find that it gives them power.
> ...am I more concerned about the disease or the vaccine?
Is this an either-or question? We have government institutions like the FDA, whose job it is to make sure that proposed medical treatments are 1) not harmful 2) do what they claim to do. If you have a rational basis for thinking they're not doing a good job, then lobby for change; or at very least present evidence so that someone else might choose to do so.
We also have government institutions like the CDC, whose job it is to come up with policies that will benefit the population as a whole; to weigh the overall benefits of (say) promoting flu vaccination against the costs and risks.
Sure, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC experienced political pressure. But that was because lockdowns are inherently politically unpopular.
I'm not aware of any such political pressure regarding flu vaccination; which makes your skepticism -- particularly without any evidence presented for it -- seem irrational.
> If you have a rational basis for thinking they're not doing a good job, then lobby for change; or at very least present evidence so that someone else might choose to do so.
> Two senior officials have resigned from their positions within the US Food and Drug Administration over frustrations with the Biden administration’s plans to move forward with recommending COVID-19 booster shots without their prior approval, according to a report.
I also remember more where the FDA went against their panel's advice about authorization for children, but am having trouble finding it now.
Right, COVID-19 has caused political pressure related to COVID-19 because lockdowns are politically unpopular. The fact that two senior officials resigned sort of implies that the FDA is still very robust, and takes its mandate very seriously; meaning in the absence of political pressure -- for instance, when talking about the flu -- their recommendations are probably pretty reliable.
The other challenge of a flu vaccine is getting people to take it. This past year, just over half the population received a flu vaccination [0]. But maybe a more effective vaccine would be more appealing, so this vaccine might also address that part of the problem. It’s unclear whether from the part of this article not paywalled, but if it eliminates the need for annual shots, that would also help, too.
All vaccines have small risks. I’ve had family members get lifelong painful complications from I think two different vaccines, neither related to the recent ones. So it makes me a little hesitant when I know that I’ll survive the flu like I have many times before.
In my case, I had actual flue exactly once in my life. It was super unpleasant, but no big deal and ended in exactly one week.
I got flu shot three times and got sick with (not flu ordinary sickness) right after three times and it took two weeks to feel good after. I guess the issue is that I am rarely entirely healthy during cold season and flu shot pushes me over the line. Not really work it.
I would take it if I had reason to - like a relative with super weak immune system or had to go to hospital whatever. But other then that, it is not worth it.
At least for me, the first several times I got the flu shot, I had a fairly strong immune response; this is probably good, but still two to three days of disruption. The last couple shots haven't been so bad (or I also had a covid shot at the same time, so who knows).
But after the first two flu shots it was: known couple of days feeling sick plus very low chance of major complication vs unlikely several days of feeling sick plys low chance of major complication ... and there's a decent chance of getting the shot, feeling sick, and then getting the flu and feeling sick again.
Now that I've gotten the shot enough times that I don't have a strong response, it's easier to just get it. The very low chance of major complications with no family history of such isn't enough for me to worry about. But the US has different policies on this intervention than other countries, so reasonable people can differ, I guess.
What is objective in this case? The CDC records the statistics for adverse affects, vaccine effectiveness, etc., but they also have a financial and political incentive for these stats to look good. If you use their numbers for objectivity, it's already inherently subjective based on the way they record metrics, and the metrics they focused on. I saw this very plainly with Covid case metrics.
What makes you say they have financial and political incentives? They get funded whether you get the flu or not, so that seems very hard to believe. They also aren’t tied to a standing in their ability to prevent the flu, so what would be the political risk? And that’s even assuming the scientists behind it could be swayed by politics in reporting of stats.
I'm not advocating for either position in this thread, but surely you watched the CDC switch from one policy position to another dramatically different position multiple times during 2021.
They made decisions and rewrote those decisions within 24 hours due to political blowback not just once, but multiple times. They might do good science, but they lost any trust I had in their ability to set and execute a coherent national policy.
Yeah man, the CDC probably knew the right path from the beginning, but they lied to us and said not to use masks, then they said it was OK to keep congregating so long as we wash our hands.
It's no coincidence that most pseudo-science alternatives always have an answer for things and it never changes (see homeopathy or the general notion that if it's "natural" it must always br the best)
I wonder why the anti-vaccine people can't crowd-fund serious systematic studies about the phenomenon.
All what I see are citations of papers about this or that detail and then use it as "proof!".
There are hundreds of millions if not even more people who are fearful of vaccines and/or don't trust the government/elites involvement in the research.
All they have to do is to hire a very large number of scientists to do serious independent research.
Why would they? There is plenty of proof of safety, they just ignore that. They don’t actually have the ability to understand what questions to be asking, what good study design looks like, how to interpret results, what statistics matter, the background of knowledge used to interpret any results, etc. Which is fine because few do, and the best at it are already hired into the right roles. Those are the opinions one should use as a proxy, not because they’re perfect and never make a mistake, but because the ordinary person would be spectacularly worse at it.
Yet they “do research” which means just let confirmation bias run wild completely ungrounded. Let’s say they funded such a study and it came back with “the mainstream” answer which isn’t what they want.. you think they’d change their mind? I had read that flat earthers have tried to do similar things, each time getting the “wrong answer,” so they explain it away incorrectly.
It’s very sad because all of this “destroy institutions, destroy science, destroy XYZ” is rooted in extreme greed for one particular thing (eg less taxes for the Koch brothers) and it ends up taking all of society out with it. It’s very easy to be against something, particularly when you don’t understand it.
Because the vaccine makers have thousands of times more money and media power. A study is just a study. They'd fund multiple counter studies.
Vaccines are a subscription model business for pharma. Every time they get a new vaccine approved it's a potential market of 8 billion people that they don't have to wait for to get sick.
People argue that pharma would actually make more money not selling flu vaccines, for example, because people would have to pay for more expensive treatments that would benefit them more, but that's illogical because most flu is treated with cheap otc meds at home.
Vaccines are great, but people will lose faith in them if they get the impression that pharma is motivated by greed and not for doing good for humanity.
But it's not about who has the most number of studies. It's about having a sufficient number of diverse studies that can be used to have a reasoned conversation about the topic instead of always ending spinning in circles with generic allegations linking one or two "papers" "proving" that "everybody is wrong!!".
If everybody is wrong then it shouldn't be that hard to prove it. You don't need big pharma pockets.
If in principle you can't find 500M people willing to invest $10 in a crowd funding campaign it means that the vaccine skeptics are actually a minority and why are we having this conversation?
With 5 billion dollars you can find enough scientists to seriously research and rigorously destroy any bullshit that big pharma is selling to us!
But it's not like this research output in itself would prove the anti vax point. It's not a quantity versus quantity, my word against your word mechanism.
Once we have that body of well written papers, then we can have a next level discussion about it.
As for the follow the money argument, what about this: most no vax people I know in my european country, are avid consumers of natural remedies of various sorts (not only homeopathy)
They can easily spend way more than 80eu on various natural pills.
Does it mean that the anti-vax movement is actually funded by the "Big Natura" complex?
But that's not the argument that was used as a start of this thread. It was literally "I know somebody who got a vaccine side effects and I know somebody (myself) who survived many flu seasons without problems".
Sure, you're pointing out one mechanism that nudges things the other way.
But there is also a strong psychological mechanism that makes people fearful of vaccines no matter what.
What if this mechanism may cause people to use exaggerate the effects of the various flaws/bad incentives you pointed out?
And the flu shot is considered good if it's 30% effective. From my personal experience this year, it has to be less than 10% effective this year - I know many people who I know had the flu vaccine get a flu-like virus this year.
Let's not pretend a flu shot stops the flu. It might. Or it might cause problems. Or, in most cases, it does nothing for better or worse.
Your argument would sound a lot better if you had any source or documentation to imply that it does nothing or make it worse. Personal anecdotes are not science.
What makes you think a serial killer won't murder you today?
It could happen, but you'd be a fool to worry about it. Rational people round small risks down to zero and go about their lives instead of aging themselves worrying about every possibility.
This is a rhetorical question, because statistically you have zero need to lock your doors at night. The odds of you getting robbed is so low that you would be a fool to worry about it, and should not be concerned with locking your door.
Hard to tell if something is permanent. But the fact remains that some people didn't get their senses back yet despite getting first infected with covid years ago.
My cousin got Covid before the vaccine was available. She has lost sense of taste since then. Everything tastes like metal. She’s now lost so much weight and missing lots of nutriments because it’s just really hard for her to eat when everything tastes awful.
You will survive the flu until you don’t. In my early 30’s I got deathly ill from the flu. Not an expression: I was delirious with a 104 fever for 4 days that would not go down even with medication, and probably should have been hospitalized. I’m lucky there was no long term effects.
I got the flu shot after which, about a month later, I got a bad case of flu with symptoms similar to what you described above. Flu shots may help but they may also not…
This is nonsense - like you said in the second part - flu shots work on select strains - he could have a different one at which point the shot was useless.
This argument (and similar) really sound like religious beliefs ("believe science"). From what I've seen - if you're 18-50 it's not worth getting.
If you still got the flu it doesn't necessarily mean you got a different strain. Vaccination AND infection prime your body to create long lived producers of virus specific antibodies to provide many built in processes of your immune system with immensely better targeting. This process can take days during which your bodies immune system will function but not at an optimum level.
Vaccination isn't a guarantee that you wont get sick. Picture your body like Omaha beach on D-Day the more boats landing the better the chances that the invasion makes it past the beach no matter how well armed the defenders.
If you are 18-50 the risk of the flu isn't very high but the risk of the shot is comparatively microscopic. It's still worth it on net and it decreases the chances of infecting someone less healthy or older who as mentioned before is imperfectly protected by vaccination alone. You not spreading or as much is fewer invaders on their beach.
The problem with the flu shots is that each year there are attempts to predict which strains to vaccinate for that year based on data on spread. You're reasonably well protected against those strains, but far less so against any other strains that may or may not end up being a significant part of that years wave, and so indeed there's always a risk they won't help you.
That's exactly what this attempt at a universal vaccine is trying to change.
I kept putting mine off this year and just forgot about it. I think that happens to a lot of people too - rather than just outright refusal. It's one of those things you need to make time for and just don't prioritize unless you're extremely worried about it.
Yes, I think this is part of it. I’ve certainly forgotten to get the flu vaccine in the past.
Having vaccination programs in workplaces and other places people visit often can probably help with that. Pharmacies have begun to offer flu vaccines in the past 10 years or so, which is great. Making all vaccines free to the recipient would also make the choice simpler.
I get paid (by my insurance) $100 to get flu shot, and $200 to get an annual wellness exam, and $100 for an A1C test, and $100 for a cholesterol test every year.
So I get at least $500 for spending 30min to go to a doctor every year, which is all the incentive I need to remember to schedule it (as simple as putting a yearly reminder in my calendar).
My employer has nurses on staff which used to give the flu vaccine. Now that more people are remote and every Walgreens, CVS, Walmart and grocery store with a pharmacy gives them with no charge to those with insurance they have stopped giving it at work. It was convenient to just take the elevator a couple of floors and get the vaccine during lunch.
They self-insure so it not only reduced time taken because of illness but reduced their insurance costs.
It doesn't help that most people don't know that the common cold and the flu are two entirely separate illnesses. Even if they know they're separate, they usually think they're roughly equivalent, which they're certainly not.
There's a small amount of epidemiological study that implies that you save more of the very old and very young from the flu by vaccinating school age children (age 5 to 12) children. It makes sense-- they're a primary transmission vector, and they mount a more robust response to the flu vaccine than toddlers and elderly.
Each vaccine protect the person that takes them from the illness, sometimes making it not dangerous, sometimes blocking it completely. They are effective for you even if only you take it.
Herd immunity is only a nice side effect when you have enough vaccinated people and the vaccine is good enough to stop the spread.
The point of a universal vaccine is that when something like H5N1 jumps species from birds to humans that the antibodies to the hemagglutinin stem will work across all influenza A viruses.
The word "subtypes" in the title is much broader than variants.
And it may not prevent infection but it could take some 1918-like novel influenza pandemic that would be 10x more lethal than the coronavirus pandemic we just suffered and turn it into the 2009 H1N1 pandemic (for everyone who bothered to get vaccinated anyway).
The problem with the flu vaccine, just like the covid vaccine, is that it just doesn’t work very well. I’m confident that a sterilizing flu vaccine that worked as well as MMR, Tdap, polio, chickenpox, and various others would have considerably higher uptake than the semi-effective mostly palliative shots on the market today.
The biggest problem with the flu vaccine is that there is no "the" flu vaccine. Each year there are attempts at predicting the prevalent strains that year and producing a multivalent vaccine targeting the most likely strains. Some years the prediction is spot on, some it misses badly.
That is exactly what this attempt at a very broad coverage is attempting to change.
The second problem is that this process makes it hard to build up stockpiles to actually provide vaccines to everyone, and so there's little incentive for any broad pushes to increase update outside of specific groups of people.
If this attempt succeeds at getting coverage for a vaccine that can stay the same for longer periods, then expect to see attempts to distribute it more broadly and maybe even attempts to eradicate some of the strains.
My in-laws refuse to get a flu shot. On top of refusing to get Covid boosted despite only having the J&J. They say they don't need it because they have good immune systems and never get sick. Combined with living in a red state and general internet nonsense causing them to not trust doctors anymore.
I am not a doctor, but my lay understanding is that this is ones of the reasons why we have multivalent vaccines. "Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good," etc.
If we do, that'd be good news because it'd mean possibility for consistently getting a better match with still extant strains by the vaccines (each year there are efforts to pick which strains to protect against based on prevalence, any reduction in strains improves odds) and/or might make it viable to produce and distribute a larger number of simpler vaccines ("First, returning to vaccines with two IAV strains and a B/Victoria strain could increase the available doses for global distribution (from ~500 million QIV doses to ~700 million doses of a trivalent vaccine9)" [3]).
Note that there's a possibility that a couple of flu strains may have gone extinct due to reduced transmission during covid [1] [2] [3], so we have a chance at getting direct data on this over the next few years if those strains don't make a reappearance.
They already have to formulate a new flu shot twice a year because of how fast the flu changes. And the efficacy of the new flu shot each time ranges between 10-50%, so even if everybody got the shot, it wouldn't stop the flu.
I haven't had a flu shot consistently since 1994 in early elementary school and then randomly decided to get 1 in 2006 as my work was offering it
That's it.
Never had a the flu that I am aware of.
I would definately be interested if a shot that covered all types, but not interested in taking something annually personally for a what seems a highly remote risk of infection so far never catching the flu (when even being around others with it).
Is there any stats of people who had a flu shot but still got the flu? I hear it's always the case of oh it's a different strain spreading this season than the shot...
Or majority of people who say they have the flu it's really not
It would be helpful for me if there was clearer public communication about how recommendable the flu vaccine is in any given year. It varies a lot because some years they've correctly guessed the circulating strains and in other years they haven't. I'm happier to get vaccinated in years where we can expect (a) the circulating strains to be bad and (b) the vaccine being effective against it.
> Inevitably there will be a new variant it cannot handle.
Current flu vaccines target a whole strain (of which there are only a dozen or so and it's very rare for more to show up), not individual variants like the covid vaccines (just enough mutations to be called different).
I get flu vaccines yearly, and every time I still get sick. My kids got the vaccine this year, and all of them got sick because of the flu, 3 times. I really don't know if the flu vaccine does anything, but it definitely gives me lots of doubts.
Then we had a family member who got very sick a month or two ago because of the flu, he was sent to ER, ICU, and eventually didn't make it. That sent a shock wave to our family. He planned to get the flu vaccine a bit later but got sick right before.
Please get vaccinated, if it doesn't work well, it may give us the second chance to survive.
The "vaccine is not about preventing the infection" meme got really annoying since COVID, since the COVID vaccine while very useful turned out to not be as useful for infection prevention as we'd thought.
That does not change the fact that the role of a "vaccine" is mainly to prevent the infection, and the "getting less sick" fact is a second class effect.
You're describing sterilizing immunity, which is a property that only some vaccines provide.
More generally, vaccines are just a mechanism for acquiring immunity. Immunity doesn't mean "you don't feel sick," it means "your immune systems responds better and faster to the real thing."
I am not describing sterilizing immunity, I am saying that the original, and the most common understanding of what a vaccine is is "something that you take that makes you not get sick". That is exactly how most vaccines have been advertised for years, and how most people think of them.
I do not need to need to be educated about how vaccines work, I know that there is a secondary effect of vaccines that primes your immune system and makes the disease easier to fight. But it's a secondary effect, otherwise we would call more things "vaccines", as we know that for example "exercise helps with immune response".
You're talking about a simplified "pop" understanding of what a vaccine is and does. Even in elementary school I wasn't told that a vaccine prevents disease; I was told that it provokes an immune response that provides resistance to a disease.
The fact that people confuse the two is a legitimate public education problem. But it doesn't change what they actually are, or how medical professionals use the word.
> But it's a secondary effect, otherwise we would call more things "vaccines", as we know that for example "exercise helps with immune response".
It is the effect. I think everybody understands the difference between taking care of yourself and receiving a medical preparation that stimulates your immune system against a specific disease.
> I am not describing sterilizing immunity, I am saying that the original, and the most common understanding of what a vaccine is is "something that you take that makes you not get sick".
The CDC changed the definition of vaccine on Sept 2, 2021 and removed the reference to immunity.
And just to preempt your question, every news source reachable via Google says the change has nothing to do with COVID or the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine.
> every news source reachable via Google says the change has nothing to do with COVID or the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine.
Does that sound logical to you? The definition went unchanged for years until the CDC came under direct attack for the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine compared to other vaccines. If it's unrelated, wouldn't that make it quite a coincidence?
I think the person you're responding to is being facetious.
Either way, it doesn't matter: the website in question is a public information page, not a medical reference. The CDC updated it because it was incorrect, and the timing of their update makes perfect sense given the public's confusion (and predation around that confusion).
You're being overly proscriptive about vaccines. Vaccines have multiple layers of effect because our immune systems have multiple layers of effect. You don't neglect the seatbelts just because the car is more likely to crash in the first place.
In which place am I overly proscriptive? In the paragraph where I say that the vaccines are ALSO intended to prevent people from getting sick? If anything it's the OP who is overly reductive.
At no point did I say that you should not get vaccinated, you are putting words in my mouth. I said that the original intention of vaccines was to prevent infection. It is still the main way that most people conceptualizes vaccines too.
I think reduction of chance of getting infected that you can get from flu vaccine is very modest and in any single case can be easily drowned in the noise caused by all other factors. But it's visible in epidemiological data.
Something that following the progress of COVID vaccines really taught me is that vaccines have an important role in reducing the severity of a disease in addition to stopping them outright. I'd much rather get a mild flu than a moderate flu, let alone a severe one.
This seems to be particularly true for fast-acting viral respiratory diseases. Our immune systems seem to have soft biological limits on how well they can prevent them.
There’s a population factor and an individual factor. Let’s say it’s half effective. By vaccinating the population, the virus spreads more slowly, since half of people are dead ends. So you wind up with less cases in aggregate — and potentially exponentially less.
Part of the issue with fast-acting viral respiratory diseases seems to be that vaccines don't induce mucosal immunity: "Currently approved SARS-CoV-2 vaccines induce robust systemic immunity but poor immunity at the respiratory mucosa, meaning that they are highly effective against symptomatic disease but do not prevent viral transmission."
I don't want the flu vaccine for neigher me nor my children. I want us to get sick and our immune systems to take care of the flu together with some garlic, hot tea and down time. At the same time the adults are vaccinated for COVID and our children are vaccinated for the usual stuff that will kill them.
I think that my employer really wants to avoid any downtime of his workforce and suggests a flu vaccination every year. I think that some downtime is good for my wellbeing and that I don't wan't to be more effective.
Being on the management side of things for a company that offered free flu shots in office for convenience to the employees (despite health insurance coverage at doctors offices and pharmacies), we absolutely did it to minimize the sick time impact to the company.
I do not see what is wrong with that motive. Companies have a duty to protect themselves do they not?
Well it certainly wasn’t mandatory and no records were kept of who did and who didn’t, and there was no stigma or recourse if someone opted out.
However it was definitely effectively in decreasing the number of employees who took sick time during flu season though. Just the convenience of running down to the break room to get it vs going to a clinic increased the number of employees who would get the seasonal shot.
I think you seriously underestimate just how bad the flu can be. Perhaps you've not experienced it really bad? In the 2010-2011 year, there were ~290,000 hospitalizations from the flu, and ~37,000 deaths. There were 10 million medical visits. And all of that is _with_ people being vaccinated. I expect it would be much worse without vaccinations.
Sure, most of the time you get the flu it sucks but it's not a big deal... but it can be pretty bad. It's well worth getting the vaccination, especially if your company or insurance provides it for free, just to avoid the possibility of severe issues.
I had a serious flu 3 times that I remember. Fever for a few days and hurting all over. This is goes away if I drink plenty of fluids and get rest.
I might change my mind when I get older but right now I don't mind this.
Also I don't understand the negative comments. I don't reject vaccines in general. I just don't think that flu vaccination is required for me. Yes, I know that flu might kill me one day, but so can so much else.
Small sample sizes can make it very difficult to determine effectiveness. Fortunately there is a ton of data out though if you are curious. The effectiveness does vary widely from year to year.
Vaccine is against one type of flu. Maybe you didn’t get sick with the other one but only this one. This is what the article is talking about. Covering all flu so that you don’t get sick.
It seems that mRNA vaccines are becoming like antivirus software updates: inject the whole "database" and your body scans for currently-known threats. Does the immune system have a capacity limit?
I wonder if the technology will reach a point where we can print mRNA on demand. Could we build a database of bacteriophage viruses that target various strains of bacteria, and use custom-printed mRNA to produce the correct virus when someone has a bacterial infection?
IIRC, “printing mRNA vaccines on demand” was pretty much Moderna’s original startup pitch. Their idea was to create custom cancer vaccines for each patient.
The immune system has already been dealing with the problem of finite resources for the past 500M years or so.
The biggest issue is that circulating neutralizing antibodies take up a finite fraction of the blood. One of the reasons why neutralizing antibodies fade over time is to literally make more space for other antibodies. One of the reasons why you need a boost of a vaccine at least 6 months after the first dose is that somatic hypermutation takes time to develop high affinity neutralizing antibodies that are effective in much small fractions of the blood.
Even after that though neutralizing antibodies still tend to fade and what is left is just the memory T-cells and B-cells in lymph tissue. So the immune system naturally activates and deactivates. But this is more like a book on a bookshelf. It isn't really consuming "energy" and there's a massive amount of them that are available.
You also need to be much more worried about all the naturally occurring viruses and antigens that you're being exposed to--including the ones that don't actually get you sick at all. You're worrying about the sparring partners of a heavyweight prizefighter "sapping their energy" and ignoring the real opponents.
If you've read something about COVID and lympocytopenia ("T-cell exhaustion") then that only happens in severe COVID and shows up in autopsies and is studied as an indicator of how mild (unhospitalized) COVID turns into severe life-threatening COVID. The people who talk about that on social media are literally ignorant idiots who don't know what they're talking about.
My understanding it they do something like this for bone marrow transplants with radiation/chemotherapy. Hopefully helps with Google searches, or someone coming to correct me :)
Also notable that this is a beyond extreme treatment. Incredibly stressful on the body, a method of last resort. Through, it has had a few high profile success stories.
Well, we kind of do it during blood cancer chemotherapy. It probably resolves some autoimmune diseases but also makes you liable to dying of common cold.
Many autoimmune diseases don't appear to be caused by immune memory, at least alone. There is evidence for cyclic inflammation by the innate immune system and also latent inflammation from gut bacteria and their outputs.
What you are describing (bone marrow radiation) has been used to treat Multiple Sclerosis. But diets (which radically change gut bacteria) have also been used to treat MS. So it's complicated, and it's possible for what is currently considered a single disease to be a common symptomatology for different root causes.
I believe one of the effects of measles infection is that sort of wiping of immune memory. It's one of the things that makes childhood measles so nasty.
We print RNA on demand already. There’s a company called Synthego that invented a lab-in-a-box to synthesize arbitrary oligonucleotides in a machine that fits inside a server rack. They use their technology to sell full genome engineering solutions.
It was concerning to see the mRNA vaccines associated with myocarditis. It seems like that made the public unnecessarily skeptical of mRNA as a technology. But my understanding is that was a protein engineering issue that could have happened with any vaccine technology and was not specific to mRNA as a platform.
Are there any experts here that can confirm that is a coincidence or explain why mRNA as a technology is more susceptible to issues like that?
This is a case study of myocarditis after an influenza vaccine. This single data point, or even the fact that this is a possible immune reaction doesn't really speak to the issue I'm asking about.
In the last few years a slew of COVID vaccines were widely deployed without myocarditis as a complication. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines made headline news for their elevated risk of myocarditis, and resulted in changes in vaccine recommendations for certain demographics. Both were mRNA based. Do they have other things in common, dosage, proteins, preservatives, shelf lives? What else is similar between them and different from the other vaccines?
Having just got over the hump of a pretty bad flu I picked up traveling over the holidays this can’t come soon enough. I got a flu shot earlier this year so I either picked up a different variant or shudder to think that this experience could have been even worse than it was (three days of 102+ fever).
It’s pretty disheartening to see so many comments here questioning the flu vaccine. So much anecdotal fallacy happening here. I would expect numeracy of this audience to be relatively high…
The flu has always had the strange attribute of being familiar enough that people are not afraid of it, but every 100 years or so it might kill a few million people.
On top of that there have been incidents where the risk was oversold (Swine Flu in the 1970#] and the vaccine is problematic.
Thanks to a perverse reaction (you tell me to do this so I will not do it) we are going to see uptake of all kinds of vaccine drop.
Myself I got the quadrivalent flu shot, my wife didn’t, she got the flu for thanksgiving and was off her feet for three days. I slept next to her the whole time and did not get it. If I had, watching her suffering, I would have called my doc for antivirals at the first sign.
The problem is that most people call a mild cold or even an abortive infection "flu". Actual influenza doesn't happen that commonly to healthy adults and is really unpleasant. Cooking your vitals at 103F for 3 days is also probably not without risk of long-term damage, and there's always some risk of hospitalization even in healthy adults.
Calling every sniffle “the flu” is a bit of a peev of mine. I hear it from people all the time.
Based on the descriptions I have read of influenza, I’m relatively certain I have either never had it or have had it maybe once in my adult life.
Most years I get a bad cold that lasts 5 days or so (plus some time for my sinuses to completely return to normal) and maybe a couple lesser colds. None of these are “the flu”.
I get the flu vaccine every year, but only started that around age 35 or so. I’m in my early 50’s now.
I think part of it is the guilt of taking time off of work so everything gets dubbed "the flu" to justify it.
I've only had the flu once that I know of after an conference in Las Vegas about 12yrs ago, and it was the worst illness I've ever had. I went into work on day 1, immediately turned around went home, and nearly passed out going up the stairs. The next three days were a fugue of blinking and the shadows from the trees outside moving.
Yeah back when I first started WFH (2015-ish) I skipped the flu shot for 2-3 years due to simple laziness until I finally caught the real thing. It was 3 solid days of 103F fever which was sweating in bed, combined with all kind of mild hallucinatory effects and complete incapacity, and the week after the fever broke I had a hard time just moving my body for more than 30-60 minutes at a time before having to lie down. The hangover lasted about a month before my energy levels got back to normal ("post-viral fatigue" before that term became popular -- also there's probably a risk of persistent ME/CFS or "long influenza" post-recovery).
For anyone with unvaccinated proper influenza there should be no question of if you're going to work or not. You're not going to be capable of it. Trying to order groceries online should be highly mentally taxing.
I'd strongly recommend once someone sees a fever above 100F that they get antivirals as well and not try to suffer through it like a dumbass.
(Tangentially, compare to people who "got the worst sickness of their adult life" in late 2019 and swear they were patient zero of COVID in the US -- probably just influenza, 19/20 was a bad season before COVID hit).
From the source paper that is being referenced (from Nature):
> During seasonal influenza epidemics, diagnosis on the basis of clinical presentation has reasonable accuracy in previously healthy young and middle-aged adults, in whom the presence of fever with either cough or sore throat is associated with influenza virus infection in ~80% of patients.
So Wikipedia doesn’t add that this statement is about the accuracy of diagnosis by a clinician, and completely ignores the important symptom of a fever.
Just prior to the statement referring to 80%, Wikipedia also states the following, with references:
> In a typical year, influenza viruses infect 5–15% of the global population
> The problem is that most people call a mild cold or even an abortive infection "flu".
This is one of a class of problem I've identified as "stuff i learned in my childhood that is simply wrong".
For some reason, I grew up with the impression that vomiting and/or GI issues could be the flu, or the 24 hour flu. I'm not entirely sure how respiratory viruses with fevers became confused in such a manner.
This is just as untrue as it was for Covid. Some people are asymptomatic with flu, others mildly ill, others bedridden but for an unpredictable period of time, and others are hospitalised or killed. Without a PCR test it’s just a non-specific viral infection.
Colloquially flu is often reserved for a non-specific viral infection that makes you very unwell, but that could be a “common cold virus”, while somebody with a “cold” might be suffering from influenza!
I’m surprised that this belief still holds despite the wide exposure to higher quality information on this topic during the pandemic.
I'm not talking about asymptomatic or abortive infections and talking about typical symptomatic infections in otherwise healthy (but unvaccinated) adults.
Rhinovirus, common cold coronaviruses, metapneumovirus and even RSV don't commonly cause the high fever seen in typical symptomatic influenza cases--which is what the influenza vaccine is seeking to avoid.
And the whole point is that vaccination will help to prevent a symptomatic infection typically characterized by ~103F fever for up to 3 days with one of those asymptomatic infections that you mention.
And the problem is that most adults may go years or even decades between those severe enough flu infections. They're mostly likely just catching colds. Maybe they caught a flu strain and their adaptive or innate immune system fought it off so they really did have "24 hour flu". But the point is that those very mild respiratory infections are not characteristic of a typical symptomatic influenza presentation which can be prevented by the vaccine. People become complacent talking about those symptoms as being typical of influenza, while typical symptomatic presentation of influenza is much worse.
And even if you want to go down the rabbit hold of arguing PCR this or that and maybe there's a wild amount of asymptomatic influenza infections every year -- it doesn't really matter -- the point is the severity of the infection on the higher end of the distribution. And rhinoviruses really do lack that level of severity because they don't carry the same disease burden and don't kill as many people.
It is also ridiculous that we now "know" so much about viruses that I have to type out that much crap in order to just say "influenza virus kicks your ass way harder than the common cold".
If you just said “flu kicks your ass more than the common cold” we’d be in agreement, since “common cold” means a mild non-specific viral infection, and “flu” means a severe non-specific viral infection.
But once you arbitrarily declare somebody didn’t have flu if they weren’t sick for three or more days, or didn’t get a high enough fever, well then I don’t think that’s valid either in common usage or scientifically.
Since you brought up people misusing terms, I think that’s a pretty valid response.
I am responding to two claims: 1) that influenza knocks you out and anything that doesn’t isn’t influenza; 2) that flu even means influenza in common usage, and so appeals to influenza symptoms are meaningless.
> typically characterised by
What are you basing this on? I have only found estimates of asymptomatic infection, but do you have any studies that performed a random sample of the population looking at disease severity by positive PCR?
Covid was a much more severe illness with very little endemic immunity and we still saw dramatic variation in outcome. It seems to be estimated that a third of influenza infections are asymptomatic - do you propose that the distribution is entirely bimodal and that everyone else had severe symptoms? This seems implausible given the broad (and highly differentiated by prior variant) level of population immunity.
The only studies I could find (with an admittedly cursory search) look at people already suffering from ILI and testing the likelihood that the ILI is influenza, which does not tell you what proportion of people experience mild symptoms with influenza infection. It does however tell you that many of these people are not suffering from influenza, but would have likely said they had “flu” and met your criteria.
My point therefore is that “flu” doesn’t mean influenza, since there’s no common definition that is either sufficient or necessary to correctly identify an influenza infection, and we do not require a PCR test to use the term. It therefore means a severe non-specific viral illness, or perhaps an “influenza like illness”
It also means criticising people for using the term for a mild illness is probably fair, but not because it doesn’t meet the criteria of being influenza, and I really wish people would stop using this kind of argumentation about it, as though they have any idea what a specific influenza infection looks like.
The flu hasn't bothered me since I was a small child, and I'm not interested in fixing that which ain't broke. Maybe when I'm old and feeble I'll start taking the flu shot, but for now I have no reason to subject myself to those injections.
I have received many vaccines, including covid. I don't get vaccinated for shit I don't care about.
The framing of people who don't get every vaccine offered to them as "anti-vax" is ridiculous. Have you been vaccinated against rabies, on the off chance you run into a bat? No, I really doubt you have. The risk is small so you round it down to zero and stop worrying about it.
I asked a question about why the injections were so objectionable to you, and then compared vaccination to insurance, which I think is a reasonable comparison. If you act this defensively every time someone poses a question about your stance, it is no wonder you feel persecuted.
I didn't say anything about insurance, nor have I said that injections are "so objectionable" to me. What I've said is that I don't get flu shots because the risk of the flu is too low for me to care. You may not like that answer, but that is my answer and that's the only one you'll get.
> I didn't say anything about insurance, nor have I said that injections are "so objectionable" to me.
You said you don't want to 'subject' yourself to the injections, and I brought up the insurance comparison.
I think you may have an issue with abstract thinking. It is something you might want to look into improving. It seems that when you don't understand something, instead of asking for clarification, you get defensive and become kind of unreasonably difficult. You will probably end up happier if you don't come across as a jerk when the reality is that you just need help parsing what other people are saying because you have trouble thinking conceptually.
Vaccination can still be helpful to the immune-compromised people around you (like me) even if you’re hale and hearty yourself.
If I can catch flu or Covid a couple fewer times over a lifetime because the healthier people around me were vaccinated, or masked, or installed better ventilation, that would likely improve my life quite a bit.
(I say this with no judgement, just to raise awareness of something I assume you haven’t considered, and I hadn’t much thought about myself before I was personally affected)
More readable analysis by Johns Hopkins said, "vaccinated people infected with the delta variant can carry detectable viral loads similar to those of people who are unvaccinated".
It’s becoming increasingly evident that vaccinating annually as has been the suggestion for decades may in fact cause vaccines to become less effective for you personally over time which can be bad if you develop another health condition that puts you at high risk or as you age generally. The theory is that it is due to negative interference:
“The idea is that the antibodies produced in year one may neutralize some of the vaccine in year two’s shot before it can trigger a full immune response, explained Dr. John Treanor, a vaccine expert at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.”
Flu vaccines make sense when someone's immunity is not strong enough, it depends on every one so, but people's immune system is getting weaker and weaker for all the reason we know, and it's a bit of a vicious circle
That makes sense to me. The population has increased since 1980 but flu deaths remain constant, which means a lower mortality rate. Presumably there is some correlation between increased flu vaccination rate and decreased mortality rate.
The overall better care didn't improved as well though? Are flu cases treated the same way today as 40 years ago? The number of flu shots increased by a factor of x16 over a 40 year period. With these numbers I would've expected a serious dent on the flu deaths graph regardless of population.
> The number of flu shots increased by a factor of x16 over a 40 year period. With these numbers I would've expected a serious dent on the flu deaths graph regardless of population.
It went from negligible to about 2/3 the population, but the population increased by about 50%. If the vaccine was 50% effective in preventing flu deaths, and there were no other changes (or if better care was exactly offset by increased vulnerability due to aging population) you would expect no change in total deaths.
Your intuition just looking at the multiplier on vaccinated population just seems to be a bad intuition.
I don't trust the pharmaceutical industry. I'll take the natural sickness. My perspective has enhanced since seeing my covid vaccinated colleagues regularly miserably sick, and the unvaccinated merely suspect they might have had covid, but barely noticed. I'm not convinced the industry are entirely clear on what they're doing, only approximately. I understand psychiatric drugs are similarly "seems to work, ish". I'm generally unimpressed with the medical industry's progress.
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