Quote:
The flu shot is only as good as the educated guesses of a group of vaccine researchers across the globe. Every February, they try to predict which flu viruses will work their evil during the next fall and winter. Their three top choices are put into the vaccine.
That's the case with the seasonal flu shot, but not the case with the H1N1 vaccine. H1N1 is a specific strain, and this vaccine has been designed for this specific strain.
Quote:
Still, some researchers aren’t comfortable with the safety data. Tom Jefferson, MD, coordinator of the Vaccines Field for the Cochrane Collaborative, an international group of researchers, reported last year in the British Medical Journal that he had found only six limited studies on safety after reviewing 206 studies on the vaccine. That, he says, is a surprisingly small number considering the widespread use of the vaccine and its mixed bag of ingredients.
The processes used to develop both the seasonal flu shot and the current H1N1 vaccine are pretty much the same from year to year. They don't reinvent the wheel every year just to combat the flu (nor have they with H1N1). The technique is the same each year; take the strains thought to be the most likely to break out that year (or, in the case of H1N1, target this specific strain), incubate the virus in chicken eggs to grow it, kill the virus, and use the dead virus particles to expose your immune system to these strains. While each year there are limited safety studies, the large-scale usage of the vaccine and very rare instances of serious side effects provides the starkest data on the safety of the vaccine.
Quote:
Here’s another concern: Except for about 8 million doses, the flu vaccine contains a preservative, thimerosal, that is 49 percent mercury, a known neurotoxin.
This is a chemistry fallacy that is more alarmist than anything else. Chemical compounds and their individual constituent elements couldn't have less to do with each other. Consider for example that your favorite condiment to sprinkle on your french fries, table salt, is 50% chlorine, a deadly pulmonary agent that was used extensively in chemical warfare in World War I. On the other hand, seemingly benign elements can combine to make lethal compounds. Hydrogen, Carbon, and Nitrogen are all totally innocuous elements on their own. However, in a 1-1-1 compound you have hydrogen cyanide, which is lethally poisonous. So, sufficed to say individual elements vs. the compounds they are in have little to do with one another in terms of toxicity.
Now, on the issue of nerve damage and the flu shot: The most prominent example people point to in terms of GBS and the flu shot is the 1976 vaccination campaign against the swine flu. Some bare facts. A soldier at Fort Dix contracted swine flu and died. The strain, in fact, was a variant of the current flu and is also known as H1N1. Public health officials were worried because this strain bore similarities to the 1918 flue strain which killed 20 million worldwide. That strain, by the was, is also chemically H1N1 (now are you all starting to see why public health officials are so spooked?). So, the government, on advice from public health officials, engaged in a vaccination campaign (much more vigorous than the current one). Approximately 40 million doses of vaccine were delivered to the American public. Of those 40 million, 500 cases of GBS developed. Of the 500 cases of GBS, 25 people died. The swine flu never spread to epidemic proportions as was feared. As a result, the program was viewed as an overreaction that was more harmful to the public than the disease itself. It needs to be noted, however, that a full 33% of the public was vaccinated against H1N1 at the time, and so many vital infectious avenues were shut down at the source. Furthermore, the common suggestion, that the vaccine killed more people than the disease, is a Fox Butterfield fallacy; if a vaccine is effective, obviously people won't catch the disease and die from it.
So, please keep in mind that when you are dealing with hysteria about the potential harm of the flu shot you are talking about statistically small groups being advanced as exceptions that prove the rule.
