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.
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.