Last flu season (2017-2018) 80,000 people in the US died of influenza. It's a real public health problem, not just an inconvenience.

That’s more deaths than guns and cars killed last year combined. And think about how much time and effort goes into reducing those.

I have to disagree about this one. Cars, sure: we try to engineer cars to protect people better in crashes, we invent devices to try to help avoid crashes (e.g., blind-spot warning systems), we try to make roads safer, etc. Guns, no. Some people do vote for politicians who might push for laws limiting guns, but in office they don't do much because there just isn't enough broad political will to do so, because the voters really don't want to do anything about the issue because roughly half the population doesn't want any kind of new limits on gun ownership at all.

A major function of law enforcement is preventing murders (and to a lesser extent suicides), which includes those performed with a gun. That’s a lot of time and effort spent.

If by preventing you mean capturing killers after the fact and punishing them as a deterrent, yes.

Prison doesn't work as a deterrent for most crimes. It's useful to keep the honest population honest, and separate the dishonest one from the rest during a time.

What fraction is that of people who got the flu at all, though? More to the point, albeit harder to define, what fraction is that of people who "could have" gotten the flu, but were prevented by getting the vaccine? That's what you need to prove/falsify "rarely an issue".

yes, but last year wasn't a good example for the vaccine- it wasn't protective, which is why so many people died.

That's a good example of why work should continue on flu vaccines.

Cool, but you do realize that not a single person on this thread is disputing that, right?

The comment thread you're in literally started with the statement "I have a hard time understanding the benefit of putting flu related medicine".

"[pushing] flu related medicine" on healthy people today is an entirely orthogonal question to doing research that improves said medicine.

>They have benefit for a very very limited part of very weak population, and even for children and old people, the flu rarely dangerous, and when it is, not more than the 1000 other stuff that could hurt them.

Perhaps it's because they remember how the H1N1 flu pandemic of 1918 killed 50 to 100 million people...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

That's not the common flu, it's not the same, and the regular vaccine wouldn't work against it.

Actually it is.

Or rather, there's not something called "common flu" (there's something called "common cold" colloquially, but even that is a umbrella term for tons of viruses).

Now, regarding influenza (flu), the virus, as Wikipedia puts it "Influenza (H1N1) virus is the subtype of influenza A virus that was the most common cause of human influenza (flu) in 2009, and is associated with the 1918 outbreak known as the Spanish Flu."

So, yes, the H1N1 (1918) and the influenza A (most common modern variety of flu) are closely related types of the virus.

What is the common flu?

The flu killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people in 1918. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

The 2017-2018 flu season killed an estimated 80,000 people in the US. [Flu deaths are not precisely reported, except for children and infants, but the CDC estimates the death toll each year.]

That beats firearm and motor vehicle deaths combined.

Not the same thing. It's called flu, but it's only in name.

Nah.

> The 1918 influenza pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920; colloquially known as Spanish flu) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus.

H1N1 is one of the three types of flu (flu A-H1N1, flu A-H3N2, and flu B) the annual flu shot protects against: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine

I'm sorry, but you are factually wrong. It was the influenza virus. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu_research

By getting the flu vaccine, you're protecting those who are too young, too sick or too old to get the vaccine or for whom the vaccine isn't very efficacious.

That it might save you a couple of days of misery is a nice bonus, but not the primary reason to get the shot.

Vaccinating every year a whole population to save a few % seems dubious to me. No medical act is a free lunch, economically of course, but from a health perspective either. It's impossible to know the consequences of such a large and recuring treatment. There is a huge difference between the one shot for years against the massively deadly tetanus and a regular shot compaing against something as little importance as the flu.

Because of the anti-vax movement, it's impossible to debate this rationnaly. The antivaxers will not listen to any argument. But the others also accept anything "vaccine" without thinking like steve irwin or mr roger: it's good, and you can't say anything bad about it.

But again, in medecine, there is no such things as a free lunch. Any drug has known and unkwown side effects, and interractions with the env, and should be use if it's worth it. It's then important to debate what is.

> It's impossible to know the consequences of such a large and recuring treatment.

This is simply false.

We've got millions of people in an experimental group - those who regularly get their flu shots. We've got millions in a control - those who don't.

If the flu shot were impacting health negatively, we'd know by now. The first flu shots were given as far back as WWII.

You mean like we knew for cigarettes that doctors recommanded to relax the throat ?

The general populatuon is not a control group.

Yeah, who cares if a few tens of thousands of children and elderly people die, we should stop worrying about them and start worrying about your vague and unsubstantiated ideas that there might be some harmful effects.

> No medical act is a free lunch, economically of course, but from a health perspective either.

Someone else in the comments mentions that last years vaccine was particularly ineffective, at only about 50%. Google says the vaccine costs ~$40, so since it's only 50% effective, let's double that cost to $80 to account for the odd year where it isn't effective¹. (And that's a bad year, so typically, we can expect better.) So, what's cheaper: spending a week in bed miserable, trying to get over the flu and the lost productivity entailed by that disease, or $80? My time is definitely worth way more than $80 — even at minimum wage it's likely a payoff, if not just that I think most of us would willingly just pay that $80 to avoid the misery. (I mean, I do: I get the shot. It's also covered for me by my healthcare, so it's sort-of $0 to me, personally. I don't get $80 back if I don't get it.)

¹I'm not sure if this is quite the statistically right way to do this, but I think it's close enough that the point holds. My point is that, even conservatively, getting the vaccine pays off.