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Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base

arstechnica.com

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Re: Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base

#91

Post by defrost »

erelong wrote: post #81
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anticipating all the downvotes Please don't do this: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" [1]. > flu vaccines are extremely ineffective They're not. They're not particularly effective for preventing flu in an individual. But at the group level, they have a clear and useful effect. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Willing to discuss it but I am definitely one who thinks it's a "scam", "mainstream" example articles on ineffectiveness: "Flu vaccines didn't work that well in the US, officials find (2026)" https://abc7chicago.com/post/flu-vaccines-didnt-work-us-offi... https://apnews.com/article/flu-season-cdc-subclade-k-vaccina... "Flu Vaccine Was Not Very Effective This Season, the C.D.C. Says (2022)" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go…

The first example cites "the worst performance ever".

Taking that as a given how bad was it?

  This season's vaccines were around 25% to 30% effective in preventing adults from getting sick enough from the flu that they had to go to a doctor's office, clinic or hospital, according to a CDC report this week.
Of a hundred adults that would have had to seek medical treatment / take a day off (had there been no vaccine) 70 adults went to the doctors and 30 did not.

  Children who were vaccinated were about 40% less likely to get treatment at a doctor's office or hospital.
(As above, of one hundred kids that would have gotten sick, 40 did not )

The questions really should be .. did people die that could have been saved, was it cost effective to vaccinate a hundred million people to reduce the percentage of those who contacted flu and then got sick (and did the vaccination reduce the numbers of people in contact).

As it stands, by your examples, the flu vaccine didn't perform well that year, in comparison to others, but it hardly looks as though it had no effect whatsoever.

Re: Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base

#93

Post by jghn »

erelong wrote: post #81
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anticipating all the downvotes Please don't do this: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" [1]. > flu vaccines are extremely ineffective They're not. They're not particularly effective for preventing flu in an individual. But at the group level, they have a clear and useful effect. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Willing to discuss it but I am definitely one who thinks it's a "scam", "mainstream" example articles on ineffectiveness: "Flu vaccines didn't work that well in the US, officials find (2026)" https://abc7chicago.com/post/flu-vaccines-didnt-work-us-offi... https://apnews.com/article/flu-season-cdc-subclade-k-vaccina... "Flu Vaccine Was Not Very Effective This Season, the C.D.C. Says (2022)" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go…

There are a handful of factors, I'll approach this as if you're acting in good faith.

1) Most people who claim to have "the flu" don't actually have influenza. Thus, if they take a flu vaccine, and get "the flu", they blame the flu

2) The vaccine does not create a perfect boundary. It's a population scale benefit. It makes it less likely one gets infected, it makes it less likely that someone who gets infected has serious disease, and it makes it less likely that someone infected passes it along

3) The "flu vaccine" is a prediction, trying to guess the strains that will be prevalent in the upcoming season Sometimes they guess wrong, and it's less effective. If we supported mRNA technology this could be improved.

Re: Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base

#94

Post by foogazi »

andai wrote: post #44
neilv wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

> The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, c…

Deserves to be named too

Re: Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base

#95

Post by lmm »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #74
Ferret7446 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a double layer of irony here, where the people criticizing people of the ignorance of "unintended" consequences of vaccine fear will play defense for the unintended consequence of causing that fear by the extremely aggressive pushing of vaccine policies during covid

If it was Ebola instead of COVID-19, 1000% guaranteed that all those antivaxxers would have been banging down the doors to get a vaccine, and would have been raging if the government hadn't rushed it out. All their antivax outrage was because they didn't think they personally were going to die from COVID, and didn't want to help save anyone else's life. 2 million dead Americans later and people still complain that th…

> All their antivax outrage was because they didn't think they personally were going to die from COVID, and didn't want to help save anyone else's life.

Suppose you're right. They're still entitled to their views, they're entitled to honesty from their government, and frankly I'd say the government should not be trying to coerce people into taking an officially-experimental vaccine by the back door any more than they should be directly forcing people to do so.

> 2 million dead Americans later

Maybe. Depends very much on who's doing the calculations.

> complain about a shutdown which should have lasted a few months max if people had done what they were supposed to

Bullshit. Countries with much higher social compliance saw the same endless lockdowns.

Re: Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base

#96

Post by iJohnDoe »

andsoitis wrote: post #17

It turns out eventually you have to deal with reality.

All of this talk about reality is giving them way too much credit.

The simple fact is that we’re dealing with idiots and pure stupidity. Idiots elected them and the idiots are having their day in the sun. Unfortunately, their stupidity is no longer contained to the office environments and executive leadership roles they had before. They are unfortunately able to make decisions that affect the general population.

The US did an okay-ish job for a long time keeping people like this from gaining a foothold of too many positions of power. Unfortunately, we lost control and we may never get it back on the right track.

Re: Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base

#97

Post by buu700 »

annzabelle wrote: post #55
anon-3988 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take but we should let reality deal the blow. There's so many things that people think is redundant and unnecessary but actually have an army of people and machination that are working tirelessly to curb it. Only to called bloat and the deep state. Vaccines should not be given automatically, because that causes people to not think about why they need it. They think that it is something is imposed on them. But if…

If millions more people are obese than were obese 50 years ago, clearly something has changed systemically that has made people more sedentary and eating more. People 50 years ago were not paying more conscious attention to their health than people today, but the background environment of available food and sedentary jobs/entertainment were different. The personal responsibility model of obesity works for individuals…

What changed 50 years ago is the US government decided saturated fats were bad and complex carbohydrates were good, and began setting policy to rebuild the food supply and culture around that worldview. We're now living in the result of that population-wide experiment.

Re: Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base

#99

Post by bjustin »

hammock wrote: post #80
annzabelle wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If millions more people are obese than were obese 50 years ago, clearly something has changed systemically that has made people more sedentary and eating more. People 50 years ago were not paying more conscious attention to their health than people today, but the background environment of available food and sedentary jobs/entertainment were different. The personal responsibility model of obesity works for individuals…

“Freedom works for me but I want to also control millions of other people, for the good of me and their own good since they don’t know any better”

“Finding and halting the boot stomping on your friends and neighbors is a violation of your friends’ and neighbors’ freedoms”

Re: Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base

#100

Post by jghn »

lmm wrote: post #95
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was Ebola instead of COVID-19, 1000% guaranteed that all those antivaxxers would have been banging down the doors to get a vaccine, and would have been raging if the government hadn't rushed it out. All their antivax outrage was because they didn't think they personally were going to die from COVID, and didn't want to help save anyone else's life. 2 million dead Americans later and people still complain that th…

> All their antivax outrage was because they didn't think they personally were going to die from COVID, and didn't want to help save anyone else's life. Suppose you're right. They're still entitled to their views, they're entitled to honesty from their government, and frankly I'd say the government should not be trying to coerce people into taking an officially-experimental vaccine by the back door any more than they…

> taking an officially-experimental vaccine by the back door

Two things.

1) mRNA technology was not experimental

2) I don't know about you but I got my shot in the shoulder, not the back door

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