re: Effectiveness of the Flu Vaccine

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I am pretty sure that is exactly what it means on average.

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I am pretty sure that you asked in the OP if you were reading it right. When someone points out that you are not, in fact, reading it correctly, you dispute it?

I'm going to try to explain this simply. The arrived at that 17% figure by estimating the number of cases of the flu that occurred, and also estimating the number of cases there would have been in an unvaccinated population. According to your link, 31.8million cases occurred, and 6.6million cases were prevented, which means that 31.8+6.6=38.4million cases would be expected in an unvaccinated population. 6.6/38.4 = 17% reduction.

Here is where it gets tricky... only about 40% get vaccinated, and it is only about 60-70% effective, so just for simplicity's sake we can multiply .40 X .65 = .26, and say that the 40% who do get vaccinated is really more like 26% being vaccinated with a 100% effective vaccine. So we can't really expect more than a 26% reduction in flu cases.

Furthermore, the reason we will never see even that big a reduction is because things don't spread that way. We can't just auto-cure people who actually get the flu, all we can do is reduce the number of people who might get the flu. It's as if we have reduced the population of the country by 26%, and you wouldn't expect to see a linear reduction in the number of flu cases because of a variety of reasons. Reasons such as highly populated areas still being highly populated even after a 26% population reduction. Or those 26% who won't get sick can still carry the illness around and spread it to those who can.

Get it?