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Originally Posted by Undertoad
Of course I would agree; of course!
But since the flu shot is one of the safest vaccines, it's much more likely to prevent you from injury/serious illness/death, so to describe it as "dangerous" is silly.
It's like - once in a while, somebody gets clocked by an automotive air bag... a handful of people have died, mostly children. Dangerous? Well they've saved about 10,000 lives, so you make the call.
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The difference is, they acknowledge the danger and work to mitigate it--after airbags killed a few children, they started offering an airbag offswitch for the passenger seat, so the driver could make the call as to whether there was a child or an adult in the seat. The child-airbag death rate has gone down; they've made an effort.
In the case of vaccines, they've made no effort. They removed thimerosal from childhood vaccines only after Congress ordered them to do so. And they still recommend that same flu shot for pregnant women and babies; what if it's not one of the "safest" for that demographic? They'd never know, because even now they're only nominally looking into it. There happens to be a pandemic rise of not one but
several diseases in children, mostly autoimmune. Exponentially more children have these debilitating diseases than ever died or were seriously injured by the diseases we're immunizing against.
Assessing relative risk is important. But they have to be willing to honestly assess it.
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Originally Posted by Undertoad
The numbers are available. Regular flu: 100,000 hospitalizations per year, about 35,000 deaths per year.
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How many of those were already severely sick with something else? How many of those were actually vaccinated against the flu, but ended up with a different strain anyway?