This is our introduction to a major new article which everyone should read before getting vaccinated.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1

Swine-Flew

Having read it, a physician friend of mine who referred to the article as “an extreme eye opener” offered the following analogy: “Trying to defend yourself from the flu by getting a vaccine is like trying to defend your house by firing a cannon at meteors. First, the meteor is unlikely to strike your house; second, you are unlikely to hit the meteor with your cannon; and third, even if you hit the meteor with the cannon, you may still be injured by the debris.” Real protection against influenza? When pigs fly…

“Does the Vaccine Matter?“  is about both seasonal influenza vaccines in general, and the H1N1. vaccine Given its publication in The Atlantic, which is no hotbed of alternative medical thinking, one might conclude that a broader swath of  people have begun to think twice about the supposed wisdom and efficacy vaccines.  The article  begins with a premise:

In the U.S., the main lines of defense are pharmaceutical—vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread of flu and prevent people from dying from it. Yet now some flu experts are challenging the medical orthodoxy and arguing that for those most in need of protection, flu shots and antiviral drugs may provide little to none. So where does that leave us if a bad pandemic strikes?

And from there, it is a real page turner as it tells the story of the federal vaccine policy against the Swine flu and offers devastating example after devastating example why the vaccine approach to flu prevention may well be wrongheaded. A few choice bits  from the article before sending you off to read it yourself:

” this is the most ambitious vaccination program the nation has mounted since the anti-polio campaign in the 1950s…”

“But what if everything we think we know about fighting influenza is wrong? What if flu vaccines do not protect people from dying—particularly the elderly, who account for 90 percent of deaths from seasonal flu? And what if the expensive antiviral drugs that the government has stockpiled over the past few years also have little, if any, power to reduce the number of people who die or are hospitalized?”

“Yet some top flu researchers are deeply skeptical of both flu vaccines and antivirals. Like the engineers who warned for years about the levees of New Orleans, these experts caution that our defenses may be flawed, and quite possibly useless against a truly lethal flu.”

“…precisely how deadly, or even how infectious, this year’s H1N1 pandemic will turn out to be won’t be known until it’s over. Most reports coming from the Southern Hemisphere in late August (the end of winter there) suggested that the swine flu is highly infectious, but not particularly lethal.”

“But while vaccines for, say, whooping cough and polio clearly and dramatically reduced death rates from those diseases, the impact of flu vaccine has been harder to determine.”

“…in 2004, Dr. Lisa Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the “healthy user effect.” They hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term. People who don’t get vaccinated may be bedridden or otherwise too sick to go get a shot. They may also be more likely to succumb to flu or any other illness, because they are generally older and sicker….In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all.” (emphasis added) …The results were also so unexpected that many experts simply refused to believe them.

“The annals of medicine are littered with treatments and tests that became medical doctrine on the slimmest of evidence, and were then declared sacrosanct and beyond scientific investigation. In the 1980s and ’90s, for example, cancer specialists were convinced that high-dose chemotherapy followed by a bone-marrow transplant was the best hope for women with advanced breast cancer, and many refused to enroll their patients in randomized clinical trials that were designed to test transplants against the standard—and far less toxic—therapy. The trials, they said, were unethical, because they knew transplants worked. When the studies were concluded, in 1999 and 2000, it turned out that bone-marrow transplants were killing patients.”

Now go read the article! If a physician called it “an extreme eye opener” don’t you think you should find out for yourself?

On the other hand, by all means do not read the article if you would prefer to remain convinced that flu shots are effective and important pandemic fighting tools.

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