FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US • Hacker News Board

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#131

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:39 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #100

_heimdall wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The CDC/FDA assumed culling was better, I’m not an expert. You are taking an agency's assumption as a fact though, its functionally yours at that point. It doesn't matter if someone else says it, it matters if you agree with the logic of how they got there. > And the point has always been to prevent a human outbreak, not reduce egg prices. Human transmission has yet to be proven. Culling hundreds of millions of bir…

> Human transmission has yet to be proven. Only the quacks say that, the science is firmly in the corner that not only is bird (or bat) to human transmission is possible, it has already happened a few times this season. This is where having someone like Trump as president isn’t just annoying, but downright deadly.

[deleted]

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#132

Post by _heimdall » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:55 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #130

_heimdall wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point wasn't that transmission had been scientifically disproven though. My point was that the CDC itself was saying that this avian flu couldn't jump to humans - they no longer say this but the earlier commenter claimed that only a quack would say human transmission hasn't been proven. Where I would expect a scientific paper to come in is to provide a controlled study show transmission from an infected bird to a…

> My point was that the CDC itself was saying that this avian flu couldn't jump to humans - they no longer say this but the earlier commenter claimed that only a quack would say human transmission hasn't been proven. Almost all medical research is in the field, and they don't do controlled studies on humans anymore to see if they can get bird flu or not by being in contact with infected birds (can't get it passed the…

You're still missing the point of my raising that the CDC in recent history claimed that transmissibility isn't possible from birds to humans. They didn't claim we don't know if its possible, they claimed that it isn't which implies that scientific research has found that transmission didn't work.

Raising that here is important because in an earlier comment you said only a quack would claim that transmissibility hasn't been proven.

You even seem to acknowledge here that it hasn't been tested or proven yet, or that we even bother testing it today. Field research is all well and good, and it often is the best we can do in the moment, but that doesn't change what the research and data shows.

We don't do controlled studies to test transmissibility, meaning we don't test for transmissibility, meaning it has yet to be proven. I'm not sure how that chain of reasoning leaps to the realm of quackery.

> "we didn't think it was this way before, but now we think it? Impossible!"

There's a solid argument behind this view though (to be clear, I don't see that as an argument Trump has made).

Science is a well defined process. When we haven't studied transmissibility for whatever reason we simply can't say that transmission isn't possible.

As soon as the CDC gets out over their skis and makes that claim without scientific research to back it up they turned a scientific question into a political one. They can't say whether transmission is possible or not. By making this claim they're only trying to reassure the public of something they want people to believe but can't actually prove.

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#133

Post by _heimdall » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:59 AM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #128

_heimdall wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would make it murder? I wouldn't propose that people should be stopped from taking a vaccine if they want it. I'm a strong supporter of informed consent. In this context that simply means that people need to know the pros and cons of a vaccine, what isn't known or scientifically studied yet, and they can make their own mind up.

We know more people would die without vaccines. There is plenty of data on the classic vaccines. If you tell people something else you're lying. And herd immunity protects those that can't be protected by vaccines, your "experiment" would put them at risk as well.

> We know more people would die without vaccines.

We don't keep up any relevant research to prove that out. Vaccine studies don't use placebo controls, meaning we only know how they compare against what is usually the last approved vaccine. If you tell people that we know for certain that more people would die today without a particular vaccine you're lying, we simply can't know that without testing it.

> And herd immunity protects those that can't be protected by vaccines, your "experiment" would put them at risk as well.

How can we know herd immunity works as we predict it should without testing it? Its an untested hypothesis, and that's totally fine if we're not willing to risk testing it. We can't act as though it is scientific fact at that point though, its a hypothesis that a large majority agree with but that has yet to be tested in any significant way.

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#134

Post by orwin » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC

_heimdall wrote: post #132

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point was that the CDC itself was saying that this avian flu couldn't jump to humans - they no longer say this but the earlier commenter claimed that only a quack would say human transmission hasn't been proven. Almost all medical research is in the field, and they don't do controlled studies on humans anymore to see if they can get bird flu or not by being in contact with infected birds (can't get it passed the…

You're still missing the point of my raising that the CDC in recent history claimed that transmissibility isn't possible from birds to humans. They didn't claim we don't know if its possible, they claimed that it isn't which implies that scientific research has found that transmission didn't work. Raising that here is important because in an earlier comment you said only a quack would claim that transmissibility hasn…

Like i said i'm not in the US, but our "healthcare secretary" equivalent similarly uttered "mask don't work, don't buy them, and if you have some, give them to hospital" at the start of Covid, amongst a littany of other disinformation, so honestly, not surprised.

It's like the GIEC group 3. If you really want to understand what is happening, you need to read group 1 and 2 data directly (i did that during Covid, it took 3 month and a new notetaking app), because you have science, and "science" (what's funny is that one of the justification for lying was "avoid sentiment of helplessness and despair").

Anyway, not surprising, USians "elites" seems super-condescending all the time (on both side), i think it's baked into their personality, so they lie to "reassure" or shit like this. We have the same in our country, even if its not as widespread.