Hundreds? 48,161,019 Americans were vaccinated, 1098 cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) recorded nationwide by CDC surveillance, 532 of which were linked to the NIIP vaccination, resulting in death from severe pulmonary complications for 25 people
You are quite right, thanks for the correction. However, note that the actual total will always be higher then that which the authorities have officially verified. I will also quote the very next sentence on that Wikipedia article:
... the vaccine killed more Americans than the disease did
That number for deaths (5,382) is for influenza in general, not H1N1. If you download the referenced source, it states that in 2009 there were less than 300 confirmed h1n1 cases admitted to intensive care worldwide.
Table 2. Reported number of new and cumulative confirmed fatal Pandemic (H1N1) 2009
influenza cases in EU and EFTA countries, as 23 October 2009, 09:00 hours CEST, and in the
rest of the world by country, as of 22 October 2009, 16:00 hours CEST.
The total at the bottom of the table is: 5,382
Perhaps you are reading that the total in EU alone is 269?
Yeah, that was wrong. I was trying to get some real numbers from the report, and having trouble understanding it. I am still unsure of what the real number is. For example, the Brazil number they use is 1,368, but earlier it states that there were 645 deaths with confirmed pandemic influenza.
Well, let's keep things in perspective. We're talking about the ethics of asking some 1000 volunteers _not_ to get a flu jab in one winter. ([edit] not about nazi death camps as the article you posted does)
And I think it is ridiculously un-ethical to vaccinate hundereds of millions of people with a vaccine that has never been tested properly (and I mean the seasonal flu, not the exceptional swine flu situation). These people go out and take risks that may cost them their lives because they have a false sense of safety.
Did you read the article? The ethical issue is the fact that you are _not_ preventing a vaccine preventable disease.
What information do you have that the flu vaccine is not tested properly?
edit to your edit: You clearly didn't read the post I linked to above if you think it's about nazi death camps above the ethical considerations of randomized, placebo controlled, double blinded studies.
Look, I don't doubt that there are difficult ethical situations. But the flu situation is not one of them. The danger of not getting a flu jab just isn't severe enough to throw Dr. Mengele into the debate.
And to answer your question, I gather that seasonal flu vaccines have never been tested using a controlled, randomized, double-blind study. If that is not the case, then what are we talking about?
And I fail to see how it can be an ethical problem not to use a vaccine of which we don't know whether it prevents anything or not.
Seat belts have been proven as an effective defense against injury and death in automobile accidents.
It would be unethical to perform a study in which you ask humans to undergo a car accident without a seatbelt.
Anyway, that's how I understand it. I guess you could read up on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Belemont Report, Declaration of Helsinki and Nuremburg Code to learn more.
Making people not use something that is proven to prevent death and injury is unethical.
Making people not use something that is _not_ proven to prevent death and injury is _not_ unethical.
None of your examples for unethical procedures have any similarity with that second situation. The syphilis sufferers were not treated with penicillin even though it was proven to be effective. The nazis used prisoners, not well informed volunteers.
And your car accident analogy involves making people have accidents that they would not otherwise have, not using preventive measures proven to work. We're not talking about infecting people with the flu, are we?
I wanted to give a more thorough response, I was attending a birthday party earlier.
Remove "making people have an accident" from the car analogy and it is still unethical since seat belts are proven effective. In order to make the study double blinded with a placebo control you'd have to have something of a mock seat belt that fails to restrain the occupant in a crash or an abrupt maneuver.
The flu vaccine has been proven effective as well. The flu kills approximately 36,000 Americans a year. Therefore, a study which involves a placebo flu vaccine to determine who catches the flu and who doesn't is unethical, since those that received a placebo could potentially die or become injured. It doesn't matter if the study infects the participants or if they become infected by general human contact.
You may argue that the participants fully understand their risks and therefore a trial is ethical, but that is only part of the requirement. Again, you can find it outlined in the documents mentioned above.
The article that started this thread denies that. You need to understand that my rejection of the ethics argument in this case relies on this assumption that the efficacy is not proven. If the flu vaccine were proven to be effective I would agree with all your ethics arguments.
What I find puzzling though is that the proof of efficacy should be prevented by the unproven claim of efficacy. Once a sufficient number of experts is convinced, for whatever reason, that something works, we would be prevented forever from finding out whether that's actually the case. I cannot accept that.
Jefferson's research doesn't show that the seasonal flu vaccine has no efficacy, just data showing that it has less efficacy for people over 60. He's mostly criticized for dismissing the convergence of independent evidence of efficacy for the vaccine. He has a higher burden to bear if he's to get a review board to approve of a flu vaccine RCT. Oh, and the article comes out just in time for a flu pandemic, promoting fear.
Fear caused by truth is very healthy thing. But who is right or wrong on the subject of flu vaccines itself is an entirely different matter on which I have no opinion.
I got the impression that even researchers who are in favor of the vaccine accepted it was uncertain whether it worked, but at the same time found it unethical to test whether it did actually work.
If that is really the argument and not just a distorted picture presented by incompetent journalists, then I think ethics is either an excuse for some vested interests or just incompetence in field of ethics.
I talked to a philosopher yesterday who specialises in ethics. He confirmed my view that _if_ we didn't know whether the vaccine was effective it cannot be unethical to test it on volunteers.
But I think you are right to move on to the question of whether it is actually uncertain that the vaccine works. However that's a debate that I'm not competent to have.
This one of the things that Microsoft got right with the CLR. That TCO is required by scheme is where I finally grokked programming language semantics -- how implementation and form are intertwined.
People take dangerous steroids and/or extremely expensive biological treatments to knock down active immune systems. Worms seem like they have potential.
Summary: Building a company and then selling it is a remarkable accomplishment regardless, and it is wrong to criticize Mint for not holding out for more.
good summary. Unfortunately, for Dave, noone would have paid any attention if he had written something so short and clear it could be sent through twitter.
I managed to get through the whole thing - and he does make some very good points. Suffice to say though, I would not let this man anywhere near a PR machine anytime soon.
There are ways to express your point and influence people - dropping f-bombs like you just got into middle school is generally not one of them.
Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) doesn't support raw files that come from cameras that are released after a new major PS/ACR release. The workaround is to use Adobe's free RAW to digital negative (DNG) converter. You can do this in a batch. Then process DNG files with your old release of ACR.
