Vaccination

December 1, 2009 at 1:34 pm | Posted in BioMedicine, Modern Research, Social Medicine | Leave a comment
Tags: authority, Controversy, Iatrogenic Disease, Skepticism, Vaccination

My personal take on vaccination is that it is useful, when applied correctly. However, I do not feel comfortable advocating broadbrush compulsory medication for an entire population. I will be posting a series of short, to-the-point articles on vaccination over the next few weeks.

Epidemiologist Dimicheli has this to say about vaccination in general:
“Schabas claims that vaccine “efficacy is between 70% and 90%,” but this is both wrong and misleading. Vaccine efficacy, as Dr. Schabas uses the term, is probably about 60% (not 70%–90%), and this refers only to the ability of a vaccine to produce antibodies effective against the virus. But this is not the important measure of vaccine efficacy. Instead, we should measure the ability of the vaccine to prevent clinical disease, in this case influenza. By this measure, vaccine efficacy is no greater than 25%.”

You can find the above in the first paragraph of Dimecheli’s letter to Schabas in CMAJ: http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/reprint/164/1/41

We can forget that controversy does not exist solely between competing organisations or paradigms, but also within the same organisations or paradigms. Helps bring the sting of authoritarianism down a bit to remember this.