Anti-h1n1 vaccine fear-mongering runs amok in Canada

[Drakken]

Is it me or is Drakken awful defensive about this wondrous vaccine?

Yeah, I'm a proxy for Big Pharma, they pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars and supply me an infinite number of sexy chicks to sell you the Kool-Aid. 

No, it is the fact that an audience is given on a silver platter to these excremental pieces of lies and misinformation that gets to me, especially since it can lead to millions of people getting sick, hospitalized, or dead. This isn't measles we are talking about.

[Bluebook]

This isn't measles we are talking about.

No, the measles is actually dangerous, this flu is not really.

Whats with the hysteria?

[Josephus]

It's just a flu. Some people will die, yeah. But not, as Neil would say,  enough.

[Drakken]

From an individual perspective it makes much more sense not to get the vaccine. If you take the shot, you are 70-90% protected/immune for 2-5 years. If you actually get the flu and survive (which is something like 99,995% probable) you are 100% immune for the rest of your life. Same goes for getting a shot against the "normal" flu. It is much better to actually get the flu and recover than to get the vaccination against it. On a population level, the same applies, the mass vaccinations actually diminishes the populations immune system defence. 

Gee, let me choose: get vaccinated and not worry about the flu pandemic, or get the flu on purpose to get immunized, but perhaps lose my lungs or my life in the process. This isn't some virtual game theory, dude: people get sick and potentially die in this.

As for the mass vaccination diminishing the immune system defence, yeah I guess mass vaccination against polio and smallpox decreased our collective immune defences as well. I guess smallpox would have disappeared better with vitamins and homeopathy?

I won't argue further than that. It's beyond the level of bullshit.

As for the "you should get the shot to avoid infecting others"-argument, that is just crap. You can carry the virus without having symptoms, and you can transfer the virus despite being vaccined against it.

Vaccination significantly decreases the change of catching it in the first place. While not 100%, it is stil very high (preliminary results show around 98% for adults under 65, and 93% 65 and older, all of them with one dose). It is still better than zero, where every single people who has not already infected by h1n1 are right now.

What remains is the national-economic perspective. The only one with real merit. Simply put, the economy is hurt bad if 10-20-40% of the workforce is in bed for a week with the flu. But its not really a super-compelling argument to take a vaccine that has been rushed through testing. In Sweden, we get the added benefit of some mecury injected together with the vaccine. (This due to packing. The vaccine is delivered in several-dose-bottles instead of in one-dose-packs. This means some form of protection for the vaccine is required (because of the opened bottle being non-sterile) and for some reason, mercury is chosen for this.

Bullshit, rushed to testing. Have you even read this thread? It has already been tested because it is the same flu vaccine as the seasoned flu vaccine. Current testings confirm that, as predicted, it is efficient in getting enough immune reaction. The only issue is whether we use adjuvant or not. Indeed, economic reasons enter into as well, but the main reason is that we don't want to have thousands of dead people  in our morgues, and even more sick people clogging our ICU in health care facilities. Because, you know, it is a health care issue?

Something stinks in this mess. I know for a fact that Swedens deal with Glaxo-Klein-Smith requires Sweden to buy 18 million doses if and when the WHO has classed an influenza as a pandemic. I suspect other nations have similar provisions in their deals with the vaccine manufacturers. It is one of the prerequisites for being a priority country when it comes to sorting out who gets the first deliveries.

The only thing that stinks in this mess is how people are ready to cherry-pick factoids and spin it around to convince people to put their lives in danger for a silly belief proven to be falsehood.

Anyway, that means that the desicion from the WHO to declare this one a pandemic meant a very very large profit for the medical companies manufacturing the vaccine.

Enjoying the conspiracy Kool-Aid? I hope it is Fruit Punch. I love Fruit Punch. It makes the cyanide taste sweet.

Now...does anyone really think this AH1N1 fits the common understanding of the word "pandemic"?

Pandemic as it spreads quickly throughout the world in a small time frame? Hell yeah. Nowhere the definition of a pandemic includes lethality, only the exponential world spreading of disease.

But of course, any other "common" definition would be moving the goalpost.

[Drakken]

This isn't measles we are talking about.

No, the measles is actually dangerous, this flu is not really.

Whats with the hysteria?

Measles are dangerous now because it has begun spreading again among children because some fucked-up parents decided to listen to Jenny McCarthy and not vaccinate their children, using the same logical frame you have presented, and thus decrease the herd immunity to a critical level.

The flu, not dangerous? Every flu is dangerous and kills people, both old and young.

[BuddhaRhubarb]

My doctor talked me into a flu vax last year. I had exactly the same amount of flu/colds I normally do not having had a shot.( one or two, relatively mild ones like the runny nose I have now) I'm skeptical. Viruses etc mutate faster than scientists can keep up. seems like a reasonable placebo for some people though.

[Drakken]

Flu vaccine doesn't protect against the common cold, which most people have once a year. Symptoms from both are quite alike, except that you aren't down for the count with the common cold the first few days.

And keep in mind that seasoned flu vaccines are made to protect against strains predicted to be the ones circulating during the flu season, so that they can be made before the start of the flu season. It is entirely possible you caught another strain that wasn't covered by your flu vaccine at the time. it sucks, but it can happen.

For the h1n1 flu, however, we know which strain, we have it already.

[Drakken]

http://www.gsk.com/media/pressreleases/2009/2009_pressrelease_10087.htm

Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 Influenza Update: Initial results from first clinical trial of GSK's H1N1 adjuvanted vaccine

Issued: Monday 14 September 2009, London UK

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) today announced results from its first clinical trial assessing use of its pandemic (H1N1) adjuvanted vaccine. The results demonstrate that after one dose the candidate vaccine can provide a strong immune response which exceeds the immunogenicity criteria as defined by international licensing authorities for a pandemic influenza vaccine.

The trial, which is taking place in Germany, involves 130 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 60 years old, and has been designed to evaluate the tolerability and immunogenicity of GSK's split-virus pandemic (H1N1) adjuvanted vaccine in comparison with an unadjuvanted test study formulation.

In this trial, the antigen content of the adjuvanted vaccine is 5.25ug and in the unadjuvanted vaccine is 21ug. The antigen content of the adjuvanted vaccine is comparable to the expected final formulation of the adjuvanted vaccine of 3.75ug.

Results of the adjuvanted vaccine demonstrated that hemagglutination-inhibition titres exceeded the regulatory threshold, with a 1:40 seroconversion in more than 98% of subjects receiving the first dose. In the unadjuvanted group, 95% of the subjects reached the same threshold. These results were obtained 3 weeks following vaccination. Further characterisation of the immune response is being studied and how this may relate to prediction of efficacy.

"This trial provides encouraging data on the potential use of a single dose of our pandemic vaccine." said Jean Stephenne, President GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals. "We have shared these data with both regulatory authorities and governments who are making key decisions on urgent global public healthcare at this time. Our next step is to complete this trial, as well as 15 other studies in our clinical development programme for the vaccine."

GSK is conducting a further 15 studies in over 9000 subjects including healthy adults, the elderly and children (including infants) across Europe, Canada and the US to evaluate its pandemic (H1N1) adjuvanted vaccine. All the data from this clinical development programme will be submitted to the regulators as soon as they are available and they will also be posted on GSK's Clinical Study Register.

GSK will continue to work closely with regulators, governments and health authorities around the world, providing them with clinical data which may help them to determine the most appropriate strategy to address the H1N1 pandemic.

Further information on GSK's development of a vaccine to protect against pandemic (H1N1) 2009, including explanation of the vaccine development process and background information on adjuvants is available on: http://www.gsk.com/media/pandemic-flu.htm

To quote Penn Jillette, untested and rushed my achin' ass!

[Malthus]

From an individual perspective it makes much more sense not to get the vaccine. If you take the shot, you are 70-90% protected/immune for 2-5 years. If you actually get the flu and survive (which is something like 99,995% probable) you are 100% immune for the rest of your life. Same goes for getting a shot against the "normal" flu. It is much better to actually get the flu and recover than to get the vaccination against it. On a population level, the same applies, the mass vaccinations actually diminishes the populations immune system defence. 

That's not true at all - you can get the flu year after year, because it isn't the same flu. What use is it to be "forever" immune to a single seasonal strain, if there is a new one every year? 

It is true than not getting diseases diminishes the population's overall immunity, but that is rather a poor reason for willingly getting diseases.

[Drakken]

News release from GlaxoSmithKline might be biaised in favour of Big Pharma and serve to brainwash people in the conspiracy, you say?

Here's from The Lancet, which is one of the most revered Medical Research publication you can find.

http://www.thelancet.com/H1N1-flu/egmn/0c03bdf8

H1N1 Vaccine Poised to Blunt Pandemic, Model Shows
By Mitchel L. Zoler
Elsevier Global Medical News
October 05, 2009

The pandemic influenza A(H1N1) vaccine will likely have a major impact on curbing the pandemic, preventing deaths, and cutting costs even if fewer than half of all people are immunized during October or November, according to an analysis of a mathematical model published online on Oct. 5 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

"Our analysis suggests that over a wide range of viral reproductive rates and pandemic growth scenarios, vaccinating up to 44% of the population can be sufficient to slow widespread viral transmission by inducing herd immunity within the population, shortening the pandemic," wrote Dr. Nayer Khazeni and her associates (www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/0000605-200912150-00157v1).

Rapid rollout of the new vaccine to roughly 40%-50% of the population is critical. "Absent serious vaccine side effects, vaccination earlier in the autumn is likely to be cost-saving and avert a greater number of deaths than later vaccination," wrote Dr. Khazeni of the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Stanford (California) University and her coauthors.

Their analysis used an epidemic model for a hypothetical U.S. city of 8.3 million people similar to New York. The model involved several other assumptions, which in some cases were varied as part of a sensitivity analysis. For example, the basic model assumed that 1.5 secondary infections would be caused by each primary infection, that half of the symptomatic infected people would have a period of isolation, that the incubation time would be 3 days, and that symptoms would continue for 10 days.

Running the model showed that vaccinating 40% of the people in the model city during October would slow transmission and save money, adding almost 70,000 quality-adjusted life years and saving $469 million, compared with no vaccination. Delaying the vaccination of 40% of the population until November would cut the benefit, with more than 45,000 quality-adjusted life years added and $282 million saved, compared with no vaccination. An immunization rate of 40% jibes with projections by the U.S. federal government to have 120 million vaccine doses for pandemic H1N1 available this autumn, enough to vaccinate 40% of the U.S. population.

"Our finding that earlier vaccination saves more costs and averts more deaths may be most important for those areas in which there is more rapid growth of the pandemic," the authors said.

The H1N1 models analyzed in this study reach an "important conclusion," commented Dr. Thomas A. Farley, commissioner of the New York City health department and an associate in an editorial that appears with the vaccination study (www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/0000605-200912150-00154v1). "The population health benefit of administering even a vaccine of low efficacy (50%) can be substantial if the proportion of that population receiving it is high," the editorial writers noted.

Although public awareness about flu has heightened recently because of the attention paid this year to H1N1 and in past years to H5N1, vaccination rates for seasonal influenza have been "disappointing." Seasonal flu kills more than 36,000 Americans annually, but fewer than 40% of high-risk adults aged 18-64 years received vaccination in 2008, wrote Dr. Farley and his coauthor. "Health care professionals must take advantage of this heightened public awareness to educate and vaccinate a larger proportion of the population, not only for H1N1 this season, but especially for seasonal influenza."

The same research team led by Dr. Khazeni also reported analysis of a second model for vaccination and prophylaxis against a hypothetical pandemic of influenza A(H5N1), commonly known as avian flu, which "remains one of the most important international public health concerns of the 21st century."(www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/0000605-200912150-00156v1) This second model also used a hypothetical U.S. city similar to New York. The H5N1 model differed from the H1N1 model. (For example, H5N1 flu is not easily transmitted but is highly lethal.)

The base case of the model showed that 2.7 million people – a third of the city's population – would become symptomatically infected, and almost 68,000 people would die if no intervention occurred.

Testing different mitigation strategies showed that the most effective plan involved stockpiling enough adjuvanted vaccine to vaccinate 40% of the population. This strategy cut the clinical attack rate by two-thirds. The vaccination strategy was coupled with existing pharmaceutical and nonpharmaceutical pandemic mitigation strategies devised by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This "expanded vaccination" strategy was also the most cost effective, surpassing an alternative strategy that relied on the antiviral drugs and vaccines in current U.S. stockpiles.

The analysis found that vaccinating 60% of people with a vaccine that was 80% effective would avert a pandemic. (An 80% effectiveness rate is similar to that of a well-matched seasonal influenza vaccine in adults.) A 50%-effective vaccine would require vaccinating 90% of the population, a feasible level if the current national vaccine supply is supplemented by 530 million adjuvant doses.

"Based on our assumption of 50% vaccine effectiveness, adjuvanted vaccination is a feasible, effective, and cost-effective pandemic mitigation strategy, with advantages over" nonadjuvanted vaccination, the authors said. Their findings show that "ongoing HHS efforts to increase stockpiles of adjuvant can substantially reduce the morbidity and mortality of a severe influenza pandemic."

[Grey Fox]

If we ever met Drakken, I'm sneezing all over your drink.

[Drakken]

If we ever met Drakken, I'm sneezing all over your drink.

Kool-aid, I hope? Fruit Punch Kool-aid, please. No cyanide additives.

I feel almost like... 

[Lucidor]

I've seen some of it. Here's a wonderful suit to have the whole leadership of socialstyrelsen fired, pretty much due to poisoning people with vaccines.

Swedish.

http://www.cmef.eu/pdf/jk.pdf

[Drakken]

I've seen some of it. Here's a wonderful suit to have the whole leadership of socialstyrelsen fired, pretty much due to poisoning people with vaccines.

Swedish.

http://www.cmef.eu/pdf/jk.pdf

I want the last five minutes of my life back, plus a blood transfusion for my bleeding eyes.

Just that, page 31:

BEVIS: Att svininfluensa viruset och vaccinet är komponenter och täckmantel för ett biologiskt vapensystem.

(Evidence: That both the swine flu virus and the vaccine are components and covers for a biological weapon system)

Come on!!!! 

[Neil]

I'm too busy to bother with vaccinations.  I'm not a child, and thus don't have to worry about them.