A quote from the CDC website: "In 16 of the last 19 U.S. influenza seasons, the viruses in the influenza vaccine have been well matched to the predominant circulating viruses."

Sounds like a pretty good track record to me. And the vaccine doesn't have to be a perfect match to provide a benefit.

[quote=Arney
A quote from the CDC website: "In 16 of the last 19 U.S. influenza seasons, the viruses in the influenza vaccine have been well matched to the predominant circulating viruses."

(In layman terms, they was a better match to profit than there was to prevention of the flu in the American market. They didn't change the formulation sold in the US for four years.)

Sounds like a pretty good track record to me. And the vaccine doesn't have to be a perfect match to provide a benefit. [/quote]

A quote from the CDC three weeks after they sponsored massive advertising to quickly sell out of the current flu vaccine - "...leaving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to cavil that, after all, the vaccine "may provide some protection or lessen the symptoms..." They admitted having the wrong vaccine and delaying the news release until it was sold.

The next flu season they were forced to admit selling diluted vaccine via the same massive advertising.

As a health/housing inspector I get my flu shot every year and carry purell with me. You guys should see some of the S-holes I get into sometimes.

There are so many strains of the flu virus that very often they do fail to match the vaccination to the strain. This is because there are several strains going around the country at the same time. I have read this and it contradicts the CDC's claims to "accuracy" but I can;t point to an article - it's just knowledge stored in my under-sized over-stuffed little brain.

I never had a flu shot. I don;t get the flu shot because I worry that I'll be using a vaccine to do something that my immune system needs to identify and fight off. I don;t know if this is correct reasoning or not, but I've settled on it. Perhaps when I'm older I may need to re-evaluate this thought process...or maybe when I educate myself more on the benefits of the vaccine versus letting your body work it out on its own.

Where did you get these ideas, Ponder? That quoted bit looks like it came from this article by Kelly Patricia O'Meara, "Flu Secrets You Should Know; Critics ask why health officials are insisting that the public get a flu vaccine that doesn't match the flu strain but does contain mercury" but maybe you're referring to a secondary piece that refers back to O'Meara's article. This piece came out during the 2003-2004 flu season.

Reading it, it's obvious to me that O'Meara isn't a science writer (I double-checked, she isn't), doesn't seem to really understand how vaccines work or know much about the flu vaccine manufacturing process, and this is really more of an opinion piece than a news piece. "Cavil"? I'm a well read guy and I had to look that word up. When a writer who is out of their element also starts putting really obscure words in their pieces, that's a red flag to me.

Just for background info on stuff O'Meara raises, please read the entire Jan. 15, 2004 CDC press release for yourself that she refers to. You'll notice that she's referring to the results of a study done in the first half of the flu season, on a sample of Colorado healthcare workers, about "influenza-like illnesses." The researchers would have probably used questionairres about various symptoms, which can mix in symptoms from all kinds of bugs going around during the wintertime that can be confused for the flu. This wasn't the usual, rigorous, laboratory-confirmed study that would be done after the entire flu season was finished. If there was a lot of various illnesses going around at that time, the questionairre would tend to indicate that the vaccine wasn't very effective because a lot of people seemed to be coming down with these "influenza-like illnesses" even though they had been vaccinated.

After it was all over, however, it turns out that even though the 2003-2004 vaccine wasn't a great match, that year's vaccine was still 48% effective in preventing laboratory-confirmed influenza infections amoung 50-64 year olds with high risk conditions (for dying of flu-related complications), and 90% effective in preventing hospitalizations from the flu, i.e. preventing the flu infection from getting so severe that people were being hospitalized for things like pneumonia. So, the actual match wasn't good that year, but when it was all over, turns out that the actual benefit of that particular vaccine was still significant. And is the exact reason why the CDC was still recommending that people get the flu shot, even though it wasn't technically a good match that season. To say that the CDC was just trying to pawn off the supply of the "wrong" vaccine as quickly as it could before releasing the bad news on January 15 is the stuff of conspiracy theorists. If you really believe that, please, show me the evidence and I will consider it.


Diluted vaccine? Do you mean, like if someone takes one vial of chemotherapy drug, dilutes it into four vials, and makes four times the profit while four people get little to no benefit? If that's what you mean, then that is false. Where is the source for this? Maybe you're referring to FluMist, which uses very dilute concentrations of live flu virus, but in this case, "dilute" has no negative connotation because it really is a dilute vaccine.

As for this idea that vaccine manufacturers are making out like bandits on flu shots, that's also not true. Making and selling flu vaccine is a risky, low-profit margin business. Making the vaccine is tedious, takes a long time, and even if they sell all of their stock, they're not really making all that much. Certainly, selling pharmaceuticals is far, far more profitable than selling flu vaccines. Back in that 2003-2005 time window that I'm assuming we're talking about, there were only two companies who were willing to make flu vaccine for the US market. For an overview of that situation, I refer you to this Washington Post article written in 2004 about the economic state of the vaccine industry at that time. We're a little less vulnerable to another Chiron debacle today because now there are four companies approved to make flu vaccine for the US (although I'm not sure if all four are actually selling yet).

How does this compare to the protection rates for vaccines for other diseases?

Wow! Just… wow! Fantastic post.

It probably won't answer the question of whether too few U.S. adults get a flu vaccine (nor whether the CDC's press releases are more or less trustworthy than Ponder's source), but you might find Gina Kolata's book "Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It" interesting and informative.

Do/did you get Hep A/B vaccs?

how often does one need to renew Hepatitis A/B vaccination? every 6yrs?