I worry that it's sort of the same line of thinking that leads folks to skip vaccinations for their children, i.e. "What about the Tuskegee experiments and MKUltra? We can't trust government claims about health risks."
To be fair, anti-vaxxers do have legitimate examples of vaccines being harmful [0]. Calling them all out as crazies just reduces the communication between sides and doesn't help further vaccination promotion.
There is such a thing as overstating one's case though, especially when it comes to advocacy.
To a rational mind, 200 years of practical evidence and the elimination of several deadly pathogens should outweigh a handful of legitimate but isolated counterexamples, but they argue against it anyway to the extent that they would risk their children contracting measles, tetanus, diptheria, mumps or rubella over an anecdotal correlation of autism...which even if causal, is difficult, time-consuming and expensive to treat, but not deadly. Yes, sometimes vaccine supplies get contaminated or have adverse effects, but so do batches of milk, spinach, peanut butter, and Chipotle burritos. It hardly justifies a concerted argument against any of these things.
It is craziness, and no amount of logic, evidence, patience or negotiation ever convinces these people otherwise. We may as well dismiss them and move on.
>During years when the flu vaccine is not well matched to circulating influenza viruses, it is possible that no benefit from flu vaccination may be observed.
I'm crazy for not allowing myself to be injected with several strains of influenza virus when the most-optimistic estimates of efficacy are around ~40%.
Calling it a flu "vaccine" seems like a misnomer to me, given the rapidly-mutating nature of the virus.
The influenza shots are really not the subject of antivax sentiment, nor are they pushed the way tdap etc are. And this latter group has much more efficacy, not even including herd immunity effects.
To be fair, you can find an issue with all sorts of medicine in the past. That doesn't mean we stop taking medicine. Do we also stop using software because some app had a bug? Of course not.
So no, I don't think defending anti-vaxxers with that example is being "fair". I realize you're not really defending their overall position, but even the line of thinking you proposed is deeply flawed.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. The article you cite is a legitimate example of a case where vaccines have caused harm, you're not directly advocating that people stop having vaccinations.
Intelligence agencies generally avoid saying exactly why they suggest something and how they came to that conclusion. If agencies were fully open, adversaries would know what holes _they_ need to plug.
There are some vaccines that don't make sense. The flu vaccine does not make sense to get because you still have a chance of contracting that strain after getting it and you're still as likely to get other strains and it makes you go to the doctors during flu season (a not-so-smart time to go).
As for this situation, the FCC and NSA should be the ones talking about it. Seeing network communications is easy enough (especially if you have a backdoor). Buying Huawei means you have the possibility of them spying on you and the US. I'm not too thrilled about surrendering random information to the spies...
Before Flu season. Or, I mean maybe the US does it differently but as somebody who apparently has a compromised immune system (it had cancer a long time ago, fixing that is bad for it but good for not being dead) I got my jab months ago as usual, letter in the post "come get jab" phone up, pick a time "sharp prick coming" all done.
The flu jab isn't very good, but, in most years it's better than nothing and it's pretty cheap for the government to give me a jab compared to hospitalisation if I get really sick.
> makes you go to the doctors during flu season (a not-so-smart time to go).
In Australia it is common for an employer to pay for their employees to have the seasonal flu vaccine, one or two nurses come to the office / work site to administer the vaccine. So the only new people you're being exposed to are those nurses, for a brief few minutes
