Flu: Questioning Vaccine Effectiveness

Veteran health journalists Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer have a provocative story in the Atlantic (Monthly) asking a scary question: what if influenza vaccines don't keep people from dying?

Whether this season's swine flu turns out to be deadly or mild, most experts agree that it's only a matter of time before we're hit by a truly devastating flu pandemic — one that might kill more people worldwide than have died of the plague and aids combined. In the U.S., the main lines of defense are pharmaceutical — vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread of flu and prevent people from dying from it. Yet now some flu experts are challenging the medical orthodoxy and arguing that for those most in need of protection, flu shots and antiviral drugs may provide little to none. So where does that leave us if a bad pandemic strikes?

Given the current public relations push by health officials for Americans to get both the seasonal and H1N1/swine flu vaccine this year, the story is worth your time, and it's probably going to generate some blowback from the public health community. It's also worth checking out "Stealth Marketing," Jeanne Lenzer's ReportingonHealth guide on how the industry shapes to shape medical news.

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