Posted on: September 25, 2009 6:56 AM, by revere
There's hopeful news about the possibility of an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine and a weird story from Canada about "preliminary results" saying that you are more at risk from swine flu if you get the seasonal flu vaccine. With flu, anything is possible, but that is more than a little counterintuitive and strikes me as unlikely. Nowhere else has reported a similar experience. Since we don't know the methods or the data or the limitations or much of anything else that could allow us to consider how much to weigh this as evidence I won't say any more about it.
While we do write about vaccines here because it's a topic in the flu world, vaccines are not one of our obsessions. We'd much rather see the hopes and efforts of managing the consequences of an influenza pandemic invested in public health's infrastructure, not redundant efforts to make a buck on a single target vaccine by multiple companies. Influenza vaccine is a public good and should not be in the market system. But that's another topic. Since all kinds of vaccines are the topic du jour, we will, for a change, muse a bit about vaccines ourselves. Because some of what we say might be interpreted as mixed or ambivalent and seized upon by a growing movement of poorly informed or misinformed anti-vaccination zealots, we should be clear at the outset about our convictions: we believe strongly that all children should be vaccinated against childhood diseases with the currently available recommended vaccines and that most adults should also be vaccinated with the currently available recommended vaccines. We believe this because it's the most rational choice given the evidence we have. I also believe it should be essentially mandatory for children and almost never mandatory for competent adults. We'll discuss the one exception we currently see, shortly.
