re: FDA to require the flu vaccine prove its effectiveness at reducing the flu

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How do you do a randomized placebo-controlled trial on virus whose antigens you have to predict annually?

By the time you have the results and approve your product, it's obsolete.

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That is exactly what the former FDA head was saying in the OP video.

Yeah, proposed idea is good in theory but unworkable in practice and would be expected to a regulate a product off the market entirely.

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How do you do a randomized placebo-controlled trial on virus whose antigens you have to predict annually? By the time you have the results and approve your product, it's obsolete.

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This argument can be taken both ways.

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Do you mean we should never market an annually updated vaccine?

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Not necessarily... I don't believe it should be universally recommended though.

Yeah, that’s debatable. When lower-risk people ask if they “need” it, I think it’s fair to say something like “for someone like you, the expected personal benefit in any one year may be fairly modest. The reasons you might still choose it are that flu is unpleasant, occasionally produces unexpected serious complications even in healthy people, vaccination is relatively low-cost & low-risk, and there’s some benefit to reducing the chance you transmit flu to other people.”

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Noted that you didn't say, "I've never had the flu."

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I have had the flu before. In the last 25 years, I have probably had it twice. I am a firm believer of letting your body fight off what it can. I am not a anti-vaccine person either, the flu vaccine is just a gamble. It may prevent it, it may just make it more mild, or it may completely whiff.

Instead of a flu vaccine, I prefer to stay up on my vitamins.

Same here brother....no shots are necessary! It is a medical money scam....
I had the flu once when I was young, never again.

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For me, this all adds up to a choice between a 100% chance of getting sick with flu-like symptoms or a somewhat lesser chance (and if I choose wrong then I just go get the appropriate shot).

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Sorta like the shingles shot

Friend,

I am skeptical of the accuracy of this message from a less than reputable source on forum filled with lies and half truths. And I remain genuinely dumbfounded by that anti-science branch of the anarchists, the populist and libertarian assortment who have somehow persuaded themselves that refusing a flu vaccine is an act of liberty rather than an exhibition of that oldest of sins, pride. Christianity has never taught that prudence is a failure of faith, nor that we honor Providence by refusing the ordinary means through which Providence preserves us.

The influenza vaccine is not a sacrament and offers no guarantee against illness, but the evidence from many studies and surveillance systems is remarkably consistent: vaccination reduces the risk of serious influenza, hospitalization, and death. This goes for two year olds. It is the same for 102 year olds.

And yet here come the self-appointed apostles of individual sovereignty, suspicious of epidemiologists but apparently trusting some fellow on the internet who has discovered that virology is a conspiracy. There is something almost theological in the absurdity: the creature insisting that humility requires him to know better than everyone who has spent a lifetime studying the creation.

I shall take the vaccine, thank you, and regard it not as submission to the state but as a small exercise in prudence, gratitude, and the Christian understanding that accepting the gifts of human knowledge is not a rejection of God’s providence.

Yours,
TulaneLSU