Thursday, October 29, 2009
Flu vaccine: Too good to be true?
There's a well written, provocative article in the November issue of The Atlantic on influenza vaccination and how the evidence for its effectiveness is overstated. In the article Tom Jefferson, the head of the Vaccines Field at the Cochrane Collaboration, says "For a vaccine to reduce mortality by 50 percent and up to 90 percent in some studies means it has to prevent deaths not just from influenza, but also from falls, fires, heart disease, strokes, and car accidents. That's not a vaccine, that's a miracle." The writers describe how Jefferson has been shunned by the vaccine research community. The article has been branded by some as anti-science and anti-vaccine, but I didn't sense that. I still think the benefits of influenza vaccine outweigh the risks and continue to promote vaccination of healthcare workers, but I don't believe the evidence for effectiveness is strong enough to mandate vaccination.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
OSHA! OSHA! OSHA!
In many parts of the country, as rates of COVID-19 are declining and vaccination coverage is increasing (albeit with substantial variati...
-
In many parts of the country, as rates of COVID-19 are declining and vaccination coverage is increasing (albeit with substantial variati... -
This is a guest post by Jorge Salinas, MD, Hospital Epidemiologist at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics. There is virtually no...
-
I’m surprised that we can’t stop arguing about the modes of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, despite the fact that most experts (including our frie...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for submitting your comment to the Controversies blog. To reduce spam, all comments will be reviewed by the blog moderator prior to publishing. However, all legitimate comments will be published, whether they agree with or oppose the content of the post.