Quote:
Originally Posted by HOOT
How do you know it is going to 70% effective? What happens a month from now if they realize the shot did nothing and could actually have more side effects than benefits?
Just IMO they seem to have rushed this shot out and I find it odd that some countries haven't approved this same shot. If the chances of catching it are 4X greater without the shot. Why haven't they done that?
What if those side effects are worse than the flu itself? What if it starts to hurt people? Should those people clog up our health care system because their risk/benefit analyst was off?
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Actually the initial testing indicates more like 90% effective, which is about what you'd expect when it's targeted at a specific strain. Obviously this is based on antibody responses - they can't actually see how it affects the incidence of flu in the population until several months from now, short of deliberately exposing vaccinated and unvaccinated people to a potentially lethal flu virus (obviously highly unethical and not going to happen).
The amount of testing done on the shot was consistent with other flu vaccines (can't make people happy though - half the population is complaining that it wasn't here in September, the other half wants it tested for years first). The monitoring program for the vaccine is also very extensive, and if any problems do come up things would be shut down in a hurry (but there's no reason to expect any problems - this isn't a totally new vaccine, just a flu vaccine for a new strain of the flu that appeared too late to make it into the seasonal vaccine).