Some Medical Researchers Doubt the Flu Vaccine Helps Many People

Some Medical Researchers Doubt the Flu Vaccine Helps Many People and Concluded that the Flu Vaccine is Obtained Only by the Most Healthy Older Patients based on Looking at Flu Vaccinations Data http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1/3

Shannon Brownlee is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Overtreated (2007). Jeanne Lenzer is an investigative journalist and a frequent contributor to the British medical journal BMJ.

"Whether this season’s swine flu turns out to be deadly or mild, most experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before we’re hit by a truly devastating flu pandemic—one that might kill more people worldwide than have died of the plague and AIDS combined. In the U.S., the main lines of defense are pharmaceutical—vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread of flu and prevent people from dying from it. Yet now some flu experts are challenging the medical orthodoxy and arguing that for those most in need of protection, flu shots and antiviral drugs may provide little to none. So where does that leave us if a bad pandemic strikes?"

by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer

Comments by Jim Kawakami, Scientist: Facts not disputed are that the effectiveness of vaccines on older people is less than young people with stronger immunity. Since older people do not seem to be affected very much by the Swine Flu, either prior infection or vaccines may still be working. Younger people with stronger immune responses over-react and flood the lungs with Cytokines and Water which can lead to pneumonia. I recommend a pneumonia vaccine to prevent the most common type of bacteria causing it.

In the 1918 Flu Pandemic, the first Bird Flu attack did not kill many, but the second phase killed a large number of children whose small coffins were seen in photos stacked high for blocks in many towns. That is the chief concern with the current flu. So far the mutation rate seems to have been small and only a few people who had the vaccine came down with the flu. So far it seems to attack the healthiest. One Swine Flu victim on a football team passed on the flu to all members of both teams. The first victim was close to death after at first seeming to recover. He may still survive. Although pre-existing conditions do exacerbate the illness, otherwise very healthy young kids and adults also die.

These researchers dispute the studies on the effectiveness of the flu vaccine for Seasonal Flu for Seniors by looking at the death rates of many seniors who took and did not take the vaccine. The results from previous studied showed 50 percent less death rates when people took the flu vaccine. One valid point the authors made is that many old people do not have a strong immune response so vaccines do not work as well. So healthier ones are more likely to respond and benefit from the vaccines.

I never got the flu until my kidneys and liver were damaged by a malaria drug in the 1980s pre-Internet days which even killed some. Big Pharma is very good in suppressing the bad news even with the more democratic Internet.

Thank you Al Gore getting the highly disputed legislation through a Republican congress to fund wiring schools and college. In the mid-1990s there were only three commercial websites and now there are millions.

Once I started taking the flu vaccine even with a drug depressed immune system have not got the flu yet and got through some bad epidemics where hospitals were overflowing in Los Angeles.

They also speculated that the healthier patients take the vaccine while the older ones who died were too sick to take it, but they neglected to mention that these people see the doctor more often and get their flu shot there.

Their data does not show that not taking the vaccine by older people for seasonal flu would have increased or have similar death rates as seasonal flu does now. I would like to see data before any flu vaccine was developed which I did not see in this long article.

Jim Kawakami, October 21, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Some Medical Researchers Doubt the Flu Vaccine Helps Many People and Concluded that the Flu Vaccine is Obtained Only by the Most Healthy Older Patients based on Looking at Flu Vaccinations Data http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1/3

… The estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction is based on “cohort studies,” which compare death rates in large groups, or cohorts, of people who choose to be vaccinated, versus death rates in groups who don’t. However, people who choose to be vaccinated may differ in many important respects from people who go unvaccinated—and those differences can influence the chance of death during the flu season. Education, lifestyle, income, and many other “confounding” factors can come into play, and as a result, cohort studies are notoriously prone to bias. When researchers crunch the numbers, they typically try to factor out variables that could bias the results, but, as Jefferson remarks, “you can adjust for the confounders you know about, not for the ones you don’t,” and researchers can’t always anticipate what factors are likely to be important to whether a patient dies from flu. There is always the chance that they might miss some critical confounder that renders their results entirely wrong.

When Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the response she got sounded more like doctrine than science. “People told me, ‘No good can come of [asking] this,’” she says. “‘Potentially a lot of bad could happen’ for me professionally by raising any criticism that might dissuade people from getting vaccinated, because of course, ‘We know that vaccine works.’ This was the prevailing wisdom.”

Nonetheless, in 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the “healthy user effect.” They hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term. People who don’t get vaccinated may be bedridden or otherwise too sick to go get a shot. They may also be more likely to succumb to flu or any other illness, because they are generally older and sicker. To test their thesis, Jackson and her colleagues combed through eight years of medical data on more than 72,000 people 65 and older. They looked at who got flu shots and who didn’t. Then they examined which group’s members were more likely to die of any cause when it was not flu season. …

When Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the response she got sounded more like doctrine than science. “People told me, ‘No good can come of [asking] this,’” she says. “‘Potentially a lot of bad could happen’ for me professionally by raising any criticism that might dissuade people from getting vaccinated, because of course, ‘We know that vaccine works.’ This was the prevailing wisdom.”

Nonetheless, in 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the “healthy user effect.” They hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term. People who don’t get vaccinated may be bedridden or otherwise too sick to go get a shot. They may also be more likely to succumb to flu or any other illness, because they are generally older and sicker. To test their thesis, Jackson and her colleagues combed through eight years of medical data on more than 72,000 people 65 and older. They looked at who got flu shots and who didn’t. Then they examined which group’s members were more likely to die of any cause when it was not flu season.

Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”

The results were also so unexpected that many experts simply refused to believe them. Jackson’s papers were turned down for publication in the top-ranked medical journals. One flu expert who reviewed her studies for the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, “To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!” When the papers were finally published in 2006, in the less prominent International Journal of Epidemiology, they were largely ignored by doctors and public-health officials. “The answer I got,” says Jackson, “was not the right answer.” …

Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”

The results were also so unexpected that many experts simply refused to believe them. Jackson’s papers were turned down for publication in the top-ranked medical journals. One flu expert who reviewed her studies for the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, “To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!” When the papers were finally published in 2006, in the less prominent International Journal of Epidemiology, they were largely ignored by doctors and public-health officials. “The answer I got,” says Jackson, “was not the right answer.” … http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1/3