Antivaccinationarianism

Like most stories, there is probably a certain amount of truth to this this one, but not as much as some people think. I've heard lots of people say that, when they got a flu shot, it gave them the flu. The thing about the flu virus is that it mutates readily, and we get a different strain every year. The drug companies try to anticipate what this year's virus will look like and formulate their vaccines accordingly. Sometimes they get it wrong, and sometimes there's more than one strain going around. Also, a lot of what people call "the flu" isn't really the flu, it's some other kind of virus that gives you some of the same symptoms.

Nevertheless, there is a certain amount of risk to any drug or medical procedure. Some people might be allergic to a drug and not even know it. They might have taken the drug before and nothing bad happened but, this time, they get an allergic reaction. That's also true of bee stings, by the way. You have to balance the potential risk against the potential benefits, and it might be different for different people or the same people under different circumstances.  That's why they stopped routinely vaccinating people for smallpox. Smallpox was generally believed to have been eradicated world wide, so getting vaccinated against it was thought to be not worth the risk anymore. I understand that they have some of the smallpox virus stashed away somewhere in case the disease ever rears its ugly head again and they have to make more vaccine.

I lost a dog to distemper once, and she had just gotten her distemper shot a week or so before she got sick. I asked the vet if the dose of vaccine he had given the dog might have been defective.  He said that anything is possible, but it was more likely that the dog had been exposed to the distemper virus before she got her shot. A vaccination will not cure a disease that is already in progress. Not long after that, I got a new puppy, had her vaccinated, and she was dead within 24 hours. I thought that she might have had an allergic reaction to the shot, but the vet said again that was highly unlikely. I had lots of dogs after that, I never had any of them vaccinated for distemper, and none of them ever caught the disease. How's that for anecdotal evidence?

Then there was the big swine flu scare. I don't remember when that was, but they were harping on everybody to get their swine flu shot. I seemed to remember that the swine flu vaccination killed more people than it saved, so I wondered why they were trying to foist it on us again. I looked it up and, and sure enough, there was one year back in the 70s that more people died from the swine flu shot than from the swine flu, but that was only one year. That year, the anticipated swine flu epidemic never materialized. Not that many people died from the shot, no more than could statistically be expected, but even less people died from the swine flu. Come to find out that most flu strains originate in swine, but they stopped calling it "swine flu" after that fiasco in the 70s. Apparently somebody forgot to not do that, probably some young whippersnapper who wasn't even alive in the 70s. Nevertheless, neither I nor my hypothetical wife got the swine flu shot, and neither of us got the swine flu either.

By the way, I understand that you guys got some snow the other day, and Detroit got even more. We didn't get hardly any, just enough to sweep the porch but not enough to plow the driveway. This seems to be one of those winters where we stay on the dry, cold side of the jet stream. I don't think we've got over eight inches on the ground. We've had more than that for a total, but it keeps settling and sublimating. It certainly hasn't been melting.