The Dystonia Flu-Shot Case
theness.com
theness.com
We need a vaccine to cure ignorance...
(I have often threatened to do exactly this if such a thing were possible.)
As hard as it might sound, even if the current vaccines actually are harmful to some very small number of children, we should still do it. The alternative is much worse.
But, transform those 21,000 cases of polio into 2,000 cases of autism, and you get: "Someone did this! Someone inflicted this, this is someone's fault, see, we're not supposed to be messing with nature."
From the outside looking in, it's a strange bias, but it's the peculiar result of a sort of comfort in helplessness combined with poor education and a preference for emotional responses over logical thinking.
Unfortunately that article did not provide the numbers required to make a judgment: what is the probability for complications with the vaccine, and what is the probability for complications with the Flu? It mentions 36000 deaths, but it is not clear if that is a high number (possibly a lot of the deaths are people who are already sick and could have a higher risk with the vaccine, too). Some people will probably die from the vaccine, too, if only because they have some stupid allergy or whatever.
Even if it is effective and even if it doesn't do anything bad, the vaccine is probably going to do little good on the grand scale.
Education is a first step towards that. Given the state of things right now, people would avoid their shots and weaken the approach. First we have to get people comfortable with vaccines and get people to stop fighting them because of imagined health issues.
But, I wouldn't be first in line for any new vaccine. Anything that's rushed, and anything that's new, has added risks.
Calling it "rushed" in any way that significantly increases the vaccine's risk factors seems to be unsupported, accordig to the experts I've heardtalk on the subject.
The thing that's novel about the new H1N1, I believe it's 'A/Mexico/2009', is the mixture of strains it comes from. However with a basic reproduction rate (in a non-immune population, this is the secondary infection rate for every 1 infected person) of ~1.7 it is likely that just basic hygiene countermeasures could defeat it. Even marginal immunisation of the population could do enough to bring the infection rate below 1.0 and cause the virus to die out.
For comparison the Spanish Flu had basic infection rates between 2-3. HIV/AIDS has 2-5 and measles, for example, is between 12-18. Smallpox had an infection rate of 5-7 and was wiped from the face of the earth.
Simply put immunization and hygiene programs are only intended to decrease the reproduction rate to near-1. When summer hits, the reproduction rate of influenza decreases dramatically.
For example, reports indicate:
- Vaccine producers haven't been able to accurately predict the yields, as is typical of a new process.
- At first it was thought the new vaccine would require two shots, now it's thought one is enough.
- Different nations are preparing the vaccines differently -- for example in their varying use of adjuvants.
- Much of the initial supplies are a nasal vaccine which uses a weakened virus. Nasal vaccines are themselves a newer technology than traditional dead-virus shots. (Nasal vaccines have a good 6-year record; I prefer a safety record of decades.)
Advocates of universal vaccination can't have it both ways: that this virus is so new and unpredictable we should hurry to be vaccinated, but the vaccine based on that same virus is so old and reliable we can treat it, after just a few months' of trials, as having the exact same risk profile as decades of seasonal shots.
If the new vaccines were identical to seasonal vaccine plus the new strain, created completely via normal processes and schedules, then there would be just one seasonal shot, and 2009-H1N1 would be one of the added strains. (Last year's seasonal shot already included another H1N1 strain.) They chose not to follow that process, so they don't get the same decades-of-safety presumption.
No amount of short-term studies or expert assessment can replace years of aggregated experience. Medicine takes decades to converge on definitive answers, and has called many things wrong for years before correction.
So please, take my place at the front of the line. There's no right answer for everyone; searching the solution space requires a diversity of individual strategies. I'm not pregnant and I'm old enough that I've almost certainly had cases of, and vaccinations for, lots of cousins of the new virus. (I may have even already had one of the "so mild treatment isn't even sought" cases earlier this year, which is the best vaccination of all.)
Initial reports said that one of the main concerns of H1N1, over "normal" influenza strains, was that it seemed to have a greater effect on those with healthy immune systems. At the time, there were some guesses that it might be triggering cytokine "storms".
Since then, this has been subtly altered to the usual "most dangerous to the less healthy" property of normal influenza.
I don't really have a point, it's just an observation that's made me go, "huh."
Route #1 is generally how healthy individuals (including the high-risk group of late-term pregnant women) die, while route #2 is generally how unhealthy individuals (people with weakened immune systems; people with existing respiratory conditions; the elderly) die.
My understanding is that H1N1 is not causing significantly more deaths through route #1 than seasonal influenza, and that the early indications to that effect were due to (a) Mexican health authorities only identifying the most severe H1N1 cases (this is also why Mexico had a much higher reported death rate than the rest of the world), and (b) the elderly being resistant to H1N1 due to its similarity to the 1957 pandemic influenza.
In short: Pandemics are complicated, and sometimes circumstances conspire to mislead researchers.
The (real) dangers of the flu are greater than the imaginary dangers of thimerosal.
Since the anti-vax folks seem to love anecdotes: my entire father's side of my family has used thimerosal topically to treat cuts and wounds -- under its trade name Merthiolate -- for a very very long time, at least since my father was very young. There have been no ill side effects.
Other than insanity. (I kid, I kid. Maybe.)