Thursday, October 15, 2009
Does the Vaccine Matter? - The Atlantic (November 2009)
Does the Vaccine Matter? - The Atlantic (November 2009)
Here's a very interesting/enlightening article on the Swine Flu vaccine. The big problem, which they mention, is that the gold standard of studies is a double-blind placebo controlled trial, and that type of study is unethical in cases like this. You can't give a placebo to an at-risk population.
My first thought was that they could give the placebo to kids like mine because I don't want them to have the real thing. But that wouldn't exactly work, would it, since they'd know I wouldn't be signing them up for the vaccine?
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There is something about this vaccine that doesn't feel right. Maybe it is the fact that it seemed to be available so quickly, or the fact that it was only tested on 600 children. I know that we are not getting it. Thanks for the info.
ReplyDeletefrankly, H1N1...or R2D2...or C3PO....or Piglet's Illness isn't that big a deal...unless you have some other contributing factor or at REALLY high risk (ie a breathing condition) I'd pass.
ReplyDeleteI'm not worried about the "quickness" of the vaccine...every year the flu vaccine is created from scratch during the spring based on the flu moving across Russia and China...which reaches the US in the fall. This vaccine, from what I've read, wasn't created any faster than that. People these days are all afraid of new medicine. I'm not sure why. When the polio vaccine was first available folks lined their kids up in DROVES for it. And remember that before they ever test on humans a certain number of animal tests must be done.
My concerns aren't for the Swine flu vaccine, per se. The point of the article is that the benefit of any flu vaccines is dubious at best, and their efficacy is based on bad science. It's easy to leave out this data or that data to make it support the conclusion you think it should say.
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