What about flu vaccines? Even govt runs ads urging people to get their flu shots, even though they have been shown to be useless.
Flu is a variable pathogen, which means that it evolves to look different from an immune perspective over time. It follows clustered patterns, where the flu strain will look pretty similar (and vaccines will be more effective), then it "jumps" to a new cluster every few years or so (and the vaccines will likely be less effective). There's a whole bunch of work goes into predicting what flu strains make most sense to use for the vaccine in a given flu season.
curious, Do you have a link to this by any chance?
According to this
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3693492/
After looking at "328 households with 1441 members, including 839 children," for an entire year (2011) these authors determined that there was a difference of 4/10ths of one percentage point between those who received flu vaccine and those who didn't.
The infection risk was 8.5% in the vaccinated and 8.9% in the unvaccinated.
According to this CDC study https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/64/5/544/2758477
"We observed decreasing vaccine effectiveness with increasing time. Maximum vaccine effectiveness was observed shortly after vaccination, followed by a decline..... Vaccine effectiveness remained greater than zero for at least six months for influenza A(H1N1) and influenza B and at least five months for influenza A(H3N2) viruses."
They say "greater than zero" , far cry from 40- 60% :D
Cannot post more replies atm, but for people saying 5% is still something.
> Going from 8.9% to 8.5% is a 5% reduction in flu cases. If this translates to 5% fewer sick days during the flu-period and a 5% reduction in doctor visits that are due to flu symptoms (some people go to the doctor for everything), that can absolutely be a reason for the government to want people to get their flu shots.
This line of reasoning assumes that there are only positive effects from vaccines. There are many many side effects of flu vaccines.
Just to quote one,
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
"Hospitalizations were slightly more common among subjects who were vaccinated than among the others"
"hospitalizations for pneumonia and influenza, that were 47% more likely among subjects who received the tetravalent vaccine as compared with those who were not vaccinated."
CDC makes no such distinctions in USA.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/vis/vis-statements/flu.html
Any references to your claims?
Though I should have written "isn't _equally_ useful to everyone in the general population".
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> > Going from 8.9% to 8.5% is a 5% reduction in flu cases. If this translates to 5% fewer sick days during the flu-period and a 5% reduction in doctor visits that are due to flu symptoms (some people go to the doctor for everything), that can absolutely be a reason for the government to want people to get their flu shots.
> This line of reasoning assumes that there are only positive effects from vaccines. There are many many side effects of flu vaccines.
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This is why I also said:
>So assuming that the flu vaccine is harmless and the cost is not too great, it can make sense to get it even if the effectiveness rate is low.
It's really interesting stuff. Take a look at https://www.whocc.infectiousdisease.cam.ac.uk/antigenic-cart... for a bit of an overview on that stuff.
Where my numbers disagree with the above (nearly all!) I stand corrected.
Personally I have never had a flu shot and am not inclined to start doing so, but I know people who have and according to them, if they do get the flu it affects them less in the years they get their shots vs. when they don't. So assuming that the flu vaccine is harmless and the cost is not too great, it can make sense to get it even if the effectiveness rate is low.
Even at their worst the flu vaccine makes the flu less deadly when you get it.
Most people will shake off a flu infection easily. The elderly or people with other medical problem may not, so I find it a weak argument to say they are useless based on that study.
The second study quoted is pretty much what I would expect based on my knowledge of influenza virus. It evolves quickly, which is why being exposed to it once year doesn't build up your immunity to the evolved strain going around a year later
To say they are useless is just wrong.
Profit from any normal drug is dependent on chance that a certain number of people will fall sick of the corresponding disease. The company cannot also count on outbreaks since it will have no clue when, where and for which disease the outbreak will occur. The expire date for drugs means that the companies will not be able to stockpile these drugs in hopes that there will be an outbreak some point in future..
Vaccines are absolute shit from a business perspective. They're expensive to develop, generally cheap to produce, and their administration is a single or limited event point. Sure you've got breadth but you've got no depth, once an individual is vaccinated they're done, or maybe they'll need an other round years from now.
Big pharma companies absolutely hate vaccines, having people pay for repeated treatment is way more business-beneficial.
And as other commenters have noted, herd immunity is a well-studied concept, and vaccines have very much proved their worth multiple times over.