They really are just like 2-year-olds, and they even say so! ‘I’ll do the opposite of what Homeland Security tells me too’ - for serious? Quick, someone call Homeland Security and get them to say ‘Conservative show hosts should NOT take vows of silence and leave television and radio forever’.

Obviously a humongous research effort must be undertaken to find a vaccine for whatever the hell is wrong with wingnuts.  Of course, those who need it won’t take it, and those who’d take it don’t need it…

If the pandemic gets worse they can blame Obama for fucking up the response.  Win-win.

These people have no shame.  They can stand there saying, “he stabbed you!” while they’re holding the knife and you’re replaying the video of their attack on you, AND get angry that you questioned their integrity.

A bit OT, on the pic you used for this post. This is the second time I’ve seen this problem in the last couple of days (see here)—no gloves! We’re trying to educate the public on good hygiene practices and then we forget to observe basic precautions. Not good at all.

This is just Round 2. Round 1 was the whining about Gardasil. Yes, there are reasons to question whether a new vaccine is a good thing and everybody should have it, and nobody with two brain cells left should trust Big Pharma - but when your main argument is “MY DAUGHTER IS PURE!!!!” or “OBAMA KILLS GRANNIES!” then, sorry, that’s hysteria.

Beck and Limbaugh hate Obama so much that they’re willing to kill precious, precious fetuses in order to get at him.

You say that like you honestly think they give a crap.

The high muckity mucks don’t give a crap about the well-being of a few sheep, so long as the herd keeps following.  And the hard core kool aid drinker will probably jump at the chance to quarantine himself in his fail out shelter, subsisting on pork’n'beans and an AM radio.  Swine flu only affects the unworthy.  Bad things don’t happen to good Republicans.  QED.

Besides, the more sensible wingnuts will get their shots.  Hell, my local wingnut Congressmen was down getting shots for himself and his family just last week, while blasting away at Obama for mismanaging HHS and not getting enough vaccine out there.

It’s all just empty rhetoric.

I don’t know why the cognitive dissonance on this one cracks me up so, but the argument seems to be, “The Obama administration isn’t making enough of a vaccine that will kill you anyway!”

It sounds like the old classic, “This restaurant has terrible food, and in such small portions.”

Obama is creating a national panic to grab power.

Is this part of Limbaugh’s cognitive dissonance?  Because Obama already has power.  He’s the most powerful man on the planet.  He doens’t need to grab more, especially since he hasn’t forfeited the extra-Constitutional expansions of W’s administration.

I suppose this is a little OT, but I have this theory about the anti-vaccination crowd: when the wingnuts and hippies find common ground on a particular issue, I turn the other way and run…

I don’t understand scaring people away from the vaccine.  It might be responsible to advocate that higher-risk populations get first dibs, and we shouldn’t be all that frantic, because it has had a low death rate *so far* but I would still want my granny, pregnant ladies, diabetics, etc. not to be scared out of this.  (I won’t personally get it because I am young and hale and insured enough to prefer the chance of getting the flu to getting stuck with needles, but that is a personal choice, and not one I would encourage anyone else to take.)

I think the anti-vaxers will keep free-riding on the rest of us as long as they can.

But what I find particularly amusing about the H1N1 flap is that the wingnut argument that the Obama administration is doing too little ultimately comes down to “They should have known all those companies were lying to them when they promised to have 120 million doses of vaccine ready.” In short, when government contracts iwth the private sector, they should expect the private sector to screw up, and when the private sector does screw up, it’s the government’s fault. (Which might be true, but is not the argument you would expect from a wingnut.)

I wonder when we’ll start seeing “sidewalk counselors” in front of doctors’ offices and clinics, trying to keep people from going in and being vaccinated.

I don’t understand scaring people away from the vaccine.  It might be responsible to advocate that higher-risk populations get first dibs, and we shouldn’t be all that frantic, because it has had a low death rate *so far* but I would still want my granny, pregnant ladies, diabetics, etc. not to be scared out of this. Comment #10: Ismone on 11/03 at 09:15 PM

well Ismone , you haven’t heard the half of it - your granny, barring other health issues, probably doesn’t need it, because she may have immunities as a result of the 1917 or 1950-60’s outbreaks.  But wingnuts are using the sensible, rational, distribution protocol - 6-24 year olds and pregnant women first as a support for the senior death panels idea, as in SEE, Obama just wants seniors to die!”  Uhm, no, giving seniors the vaccine is wasteful, as THEY HAVE IMMUNITIES.  Sorry for yelling, bu, I’ve been dealing with the local wingnuts in the LTTE section of my local paper.  Shit, I deserve combat pay for it, too.  Yeah, the stupid, it burns.

It wouldn’t really matter whether seniors had immunity or not.  If you have limited amounts of a vaccine right now, it is, generally speaking, put to best use in shutting down the most likely vectors.  You vaccinate a goodly percentage of the 6-24-year-olds, amongst whom highly communicable diseases tend to spread like wildfire and trickle up through the family unit, and you don’t have to worry nearly so much about grandma and grandpa getting it.  You vaccinate a goodly percentage of the seniors, and it’s burned through the other 75% of the population by the time you can get more produced and distributed.

I should clarify that that’s in the case of diseases that pose a serious risk to everyone.  Obviously if a disease causes a week or two of moderate suck in the vast majority of the population but stands a good chance of killing certain portions should they contract it, the appropriate use of the first batch of vaccines is going to be making sure those portions don’t die.

10 million people in the US have gotten the H1N1 vaccine with no serious adverse reactions. Over 1,000 unvaccinated people in the US have died from H1N1 so far.  Seems like a no-brainer to me.

“Hard to imagine that they would have done that if they didn’t have some solid information concerning potential complications.”

From Swissinfo.ch:
“Swissmedic, the country’s medicines supervisory authority, has approved Glaxo’s Pandemrix, but not for pregnant women, children under the age of 18 and adults over 60. Those over 60 can be inoculated with Pandemrix under recommendations from the Health Office.

Novartis’s Focetria is recommended for use in adults and children over six months old. In the case of pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers, the attending doctor must weigh up the inoculation, also in accordance with government recommendations.

Swissmedic is still testing another Novartis vaccine, Celtura.”

Sounds like they’re absolutely lousy with solid, pants-wetting information concerning potential complications for pregnant women.

I had a good laugh picturing Rush Limbaugh promoting homeopathy.. while shoving Oxycontin into his fat gob.

I’m sure all the very long lines all over the region mean that the Repug meme is working right?

I suppose this is a little OT, but I have this theory about the anti-vaccination crowd: when the wingnuts and hippies find common ground on a particular issue, I turn the other way and run…

I’m just going to second this…

Switzerland, an eminently civilized country with socialized medicine, recently banned the swine flu vaccine for pregnant women.  Hard to imagine that they would have done that if they didn’t have some solid information concerning potential complications.

The German healthcare system pays for homeopathic medicines, so I guess they must work after all despite the complete and total lack of scientific proof.

The German healthcare system pays for homeopathic medicines

Not the government system, which all moderate and low-income workers must utilize. Only private supplemental insurance for these folks, and private insurance for higher income people, covers homeopathy.

I was actually in the clinical trial for the HerpeVac - woot! 380 bucks! - and oh man did the ladies who were in charge of administering my monthly blood tests HATE antivax. I brought it up once, just during the course of conversation, and we ended up talking about it every time I came in. If you ever want to hear a really good, fast litany of all the reasons antivax hysteria is ridiculous, ask a bored RN.

“But, as the primary caregiver for an elderly mother who was hospitalized this year and last for pneumonia, I have to consider whether I could be harboring and shedding viruses, even if they don’t do anything to me.

Immunization is something we have to do for each other.”

Yeah.  My husband was just telling me about some study on the efficacy of flu vaccines in preventing death by flu in generally healthy people.  (Spoiler: They don’t.)  But generally healthy people aren’t at any great risk of death or hospitalization from flu with or without the vaccine, and I’ve never really seen any claims to the contrary.  Generally healthy people get vaccinated against the flu because a) getting the flu sucks and b) it’s a dead simple way to make it less likely to spread to the populations who are at significant risk from it.

The wingnut crazies are definitely taking it too far, but to be fair, some of the pharmacists I work with say that they’ve heard from doctors that the vaccine may or may not be effective. Anti-vaccination hysteria is ridiculous, especially when it gets to the extreme of parents not willing to vaccinate their kids for school—but those vaccines are all tried and true. For all I know, the H1N1 vaccine may have been rushed out because people needed something, and not been completely tested as effective? But admittedly I don’t know much about it. I’ve gotten a normal flu shot this year, and I get regular vaccinations, but I don’t think concerns about the H1N1 vaccine can be entirely dismissed as the ramblings of right-wing wackos.

when the wingnuts and hippies find common ground on a particular issue, I turn the other way and run

Same here. This is also true of 9/11 Twoofers. Added bonus: dig a bit in any one of these common-ground areas, and it won’t be long before you unearth people promoting what August Bebel called “the socialism of fools.”

“The wingnut crazies are definitely taking it too far, but to be fair, some of the pharmacists I work with say that they’ve heard from doctors that the vaccine may or may not be effective.”

I’m curious as to how these doctors would even know.  I mean, it’s not like drug reps drop cases of stuff off, wink at them, and say “Here’s this month’s supply of snake oil, doc!”. Most of the people who’d be in a position to have that sort of info (researchers, inspectors, etc.) don’t practice.  Are they seeing patients who’ve been vaccinated coming back with the disease?  Are they just repeating rumors they’ve gotten through the mill from pharm-corp employees? 

I’ve heard doctors grumble about the regular flu shots just in general, but that tends to be drawn from experience with “flu shots,” not “this specific flu shot right here and its efficacy in preventing the contraction of the specific strain it’s supposed to protect against.” Which I can see their point about the generalized flu shots that are recommended every year—the shot only protects against a few strains at best, and if you’re exposed to a different strain, that flu shot isn’t going to do fuck all for you.  If you keep seeing vaccinated patients coming back in, infected with a member of the amorphous cluster of viruses grouped under “the flu” that wasn’t vaccinated against, you’re probably eventually going to develop a rather less enthusiastic view of the vaccine’s ability to keep your patients from getting sick in the grander scheme of things.  I imagine we’ll see a similar thought process when it turns out that (gasp, shock, horror) Gardasil doesn’t keep you from contracting any strain of HPV ever. 

But that’s a different thing than saying “The vaccine developed to prevent H1N1 infections is failing to prevent patients from contracting H1N1.”

I remember encountering an anti-vax protester at a town hall meeting that I went to about health care reform.  He was comfortably nestled among all the protesters shouting vague cries about socialism and Hitler.  That’s when I realized that this insanity has come full-circle.  The only conclusion to draw is that they will do anything that makes Obama and Democrats look bad.

My husband was just telling me about some study on the efficacy of flu vaccines in preventing death by flu in generally healthy people.  (Spoiler: They don’t.) But generally healthy people aren’t at any great risk of death or hospitalization from flu with or without the vaccine, and I’ve never really seen any claims to the contrary.

I’ve seen a fair number of claims to the contrary with respect to the 1918 pandemic bug and H1N1. In some cases (and I don’t know if molecular types know exactly why) a flu virus will tickle the immune system of an otherwise healthy person in just the wrong way, leading to a massive inflammatory response. Which is pretty much the last thing you want in your lungs, where inflammation leads to necrosis, which leads to more inflammation and goodbye. That’s why the decision charts that are being published for H1N1 tell people to call 911 if a patient has any trouble breathing.

Ordinary flu kills the weak, the very young and the old (as I understand it) by being pretty much the last straw.  But in some cases it appears that H1N1 kills by a different mechanism, and that’s what has the public health people freaked out.

Also: because of the way viruses reproduce (hijacking other cells to pump out copies) there’s typically very little error-correction. So even within a strain like H1N1 there may be endless tiny variations.

We should continue to question whether certain vaccinations are in teh interests of public health and the people being vaccinated.  We should continue to demand that vaccines be adequately tested, safe, and that side effects emerging in trials are not swept under the rug.

HOWEVER, flu vaccines are produced yearly, changed yearly, tested yearly ... and extremely well vetted for safety compared to most other vaccines with other types of viruses!  If anything, the problems are from an antiquated production cycle, not the well known steps and pitfalls in that production cycle.  Anti-flu vax hysteria is frankly stupid in that regard - if there is ONE vaccine that people know how to make by now, it is a flu vaccine!!!  That was not so much the situation in the 1970s when there were problems - those problems are irrelevant to today’s situation, and are pure scare tactic!

My husband was just telling me about some study on the efficacy of flu vaccines in preventing death by flu in generally healthy people.  (Spoiler: They don’t.) But generally healthy people aren’t at any great risk of death or hospitalization from flu with or without the vaccine, and I’ve never really seen any claims to the contrary.

H1N1 is different.  H1N1 is a virus that takes a healthy person’s vigorous immune system and turns it on their muscles, among other things.  I have spoken with doctor/epidemiologists who are monitoring this - deaths of people in their teens and 20s from attacks on nervous system, muscles (with subsequent kidney failure and destruction) and respiratory failure are mounting.

The better your immune system, the worse the attack. This was what happened in 1918, when that flu virus attacked pregnant women (with their attenuated immune systems) and young people with their strong immune systems.  My grandmother was in utero when her mother fell ill and her older brother died - and she was legally blind and had a lot of what would now be considered autism issues. 

This is NOT THE USUAL VIRUS and the usual silly statistical games don’t apply.

“I’ve seen a fair number of claims to the contrary with respect to the 1918 pandemic bug and H1N1.”

Regular-flu, not H1N1 kill-your-ass super-flu. 

I have no idea how the hell you’d even have an epidemiological study already done and ready to go about whether or not H1N1 vaccines are going to produce a statistically significant difference in the death rate of healthy people.  I was addressing the altruistic herd-immunity reasons we all troop out and get the regular flu vaccine every year, even though we may not have all that much invested in personally not getting it.  Kind of like we all get vaccinated against rubella even though we may not be all that personally invested in not getting the disease unless we happen to be a woman gestating a wanted fetus.

I find it crazy that they’re focusing on H1N1 (“hamthrax”), which has a pretty good vaccine this year, and not on the regular flu (which has a slightly less successful vaccine this year).  It’s silly.

But what’s downright evil is the fact that we vaccinate to protect the most vulnerable members of the herd - those who cannot get vaccinated themselves, and whose lives depend on everyone else being properly vaccinated.  The immune-depressed, the very young, and people with life-threatening or fragile conditions depend on us to vax-up and protect them.

Anti-vaxxers are deathmongers.

Uh, downright evil to argue against vaccination, that is.  Sentence fail.

I’d rather people get flu shots they may not need than have companies selfishly hoarding antivirals.

I have no idea how the hell you’d even have an epidemiological study already done and ready to go about whether or not H1N1 vaccines are going to produce a statistically significant difference in the death rate of healthy people.

I don’t have the numbers handy, but there is a good chance that vaccinating healthy people will prevent deaths because the virus is more dangerious to healthy people than a typical flu virus (see immune system attack, above).  Given the case fatality rate for a certain demographic, and the likely efficacy of vaccination, the actual protective value can be calculated (versus risk of adverse vaccine reactions, which are slightly higher in people who have not previously received a flu vaccine and thus don’t know if they are sensitive to it).

One more note: the 1918 flu turned strong immune systems on the aveolar lining of their lungs, destroying it and leading to a lethal pneumonia.  This autoimmune syndrome is known as ARDS.

H1N1 piggy flu is not quite as effective at this trick as the 1918 flu, but it is also causing a muscle wasting syndrome that causes kidney failure and death.

These are not the mechanisms by which a “typical” flu can cause death.

“I don’t have the numbers handy, but there is a good chance that [...]”

I’m not talking about projections.  I know how we get those, and I’ll eat my hat if it turns out that vaccinating against H1N1 a) works and b) doesn’t save a crapload of people.  I’m talking about what actually happens, which there don’t seem to be enough cases and data yet to say “Well, we took data from x vaccinated people and x unvaccinated people, and it looks like not getting vaccinated increases your chance of kicking the bucket by y.”  It would seem to be a function of both how likely you are to get it and how likely it is to hurt you if you do, not just how bad it is if you get it.  How likely you are to get it is currently in a pretty big state of flux.

Preying Mantis, this did go through randomized trials during the summer months - Cincinatti was one of the centers.  You could check the CDC website for some of that information ... that’s how they discovered that young kids need two doses.

One of my acquaintances at work at work died of H1N1.  Felt a little sick, went on a trip to Las Vegas with her family anyway, came down with pneumonia, went into kidney failure and died.  45 years old.  They had a very nice memorial service for her at Forest Lawn with a lot of people from work attending.

As soon as they have an H1N1 jab (the FluMist could trigger my asthma), I’m getting the goddamned shot.

Ultra-wingnut Alex Jones has been pushing an anti-vaccine conspiracy for some time now. His bizarre rhetoric has been filtering more and more into the mainstream Becks and Limbaughs over the past year.

Comment #33: Ms Kate on 11/04 at 11:03 AM

H1N1 is different.  H1N1 is a virus that takes a healthy person’s vigorous immune system and turns it on their muscles, among other things.  I have spoken with doctor/epidemiologists who are monitoring this - deaths of people in their teens and 20s from attacks on nervous system, muscles (with subsequent kidney failure and destruction) and respiratory failure are mounting.

The better your immune system, the worse the attack. This was what happened in 1918, when that flu virus attacked pregnant women (with their attenuated immune systems) and young people with their strong immune systems.

My (admittedly non-expert) understanding is that this was an early hypothesis about the mortality observed in the initial days of the outbreak which was picked up by the media, but discarded by researchers pretty soon once better data became available and more so once it was established that the older population actually has significant resistance to the strain (which would bias the death rates toward younger folk anyway, without need to posit some special interaction with stronger immune systems).  But it seems to have become an urban legend by this point that the H1N1/09 kills by the same cytokine storm mechanism said to be responsible for the deadliness of the 1918 strain.

I’m going to ask you to please check recent sources before repeating claims like these, and to be ready to cite sources if you make claims.  Doing otherwise just confuses the issue.

Comment #31: paul on 11/04 at 10:42 AM

I’ve seen a fair number of claims to the contrary with respect to the 1918 pandemic bug and H1N1. In some cases (and I don’t know if molecular types know exactly why) a flu virus will tickle the immune system of an otherwise healthy person in just the wrong way, leading to a massive inflammatory response. Which is pretty much the last thing you want in your lungs, where inflammation leads to necrosis, which leads to more inflammation and goodbye. That’s why the decision charts that are being published for H1N1 tell people to call 911 if a patient has any trouble breathing.

Ordinary flu kills the weak, the very young and the old (as I understand it) by being pretty much the last straw.  But in some cases it appears that H1N1 kills by a different mechanism, and that’s what has the public health people freaked out.

I believe you too are about 6 months behind the curve when it comes to information here.  There might be one isolated nugget of truth in what you said (the decision charts remarks about breathing might be related to the strain’s ability to infect more types of respiratory cells than the seasonal flu); but otherwise, I’m also going to have to ask you not to say such things without backing them up.

The Canadian plan starts with immunizing at risk people (nurses, elderly, young children) and finishes with the able-bodied 24-60 y-o. I’m getting a chance at getting my shots in 2-3 weeks, IIRC.

At least one of our two governments is doing it wrong. That’s encouraging. :(

By which I don’t know which one, but since we’re both doing the exact opposite I"m guessing one is doing it completly wrong.

laurel (35):

The immune-depressed, the very young, and people with life-threatening or fragile conditions depend on us to vax-up and protect them.

People claiming the libertarian mantle aren’t going to do things that benefit other people, and don’t believe in communities.

sacundim, I’m an epidemiologist and I have been talking to MD/PhDs from major medical centers that sit on our boards.

You are confusing the mechanisms of destruction here, or lack the sophistication to understand the differences.  The immune system has many pathways that can go awry - hence the different Lupus diagnoses, varying psoriasis types, etc.  They even split: my mother died of a clotting disorder that is initially triggered by the same immune cascade implicated in ARDS, but that splits off.  It is more common in women.

The 1918 and H1N1 Swine Flu both turn the immune system to bad ends ... BUT DO SO THROUGH DIFFERENT PATHWAYS.  That means the end result is not the same ... 1918 went towards ARDS and had a thoroughly horrendous case-fatality rate (it went really bad in an appalling high percentage of of cases). The current virus has killed young people though a muscle wasting situation - the immune system attacks the muscles, and the kidneys fail when they can’t process the breakdown products.  The current virus doesn’t do this very often, either.

Oh, and I suspect that many of the respiratory failure cases associated with the H1N1 in question are simply “got the flu” cases - there is nothing particularly special about them ... they are, in a way, “background” cases that might have occurred with any flu.

http://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/swineflu/clinical_managementH1N1_21_May_2009.pdf

The term for this emerging complication: rhabdomyolysis

What I can never quite get through my head is how much of a nosy, privileged jerk someone must be to actually go to the voting booth and vote, “Yes, I want to prevent fellow citizens from having rights.” I just really don’t understand why the marriage of two people of the same sex has anything to do with them. If they believe that homosexuality is wrong because of their religion, fine, they can not get same-sex married. But to actually go out and prevent other people the thing they are free to enjoy, is beyond me. I guess conservatives must be really insecure in their own relationships and marriages if they are so offended by the lives of gay, bisexual, and trans people.

And I love how it’s called “traditional” marriage. One man, one woman, eh? As someone above pointed out, the definition of marriage has constantly changed throughout history. They have their religious books, don’t they know that? But religious fundies have always picked and chosen whatever phrases best suit their purposes and ignored the ones that contradict them.

America is changing, slowly but surely. Change is a good thing, but conservatives are afraid and insecure, and so blindly cling to the doctrines of church leaders (Jesus? Just a brand, like Coke, a name they bring up but clearly don’t follow the philosophies of) and an idealized past.

I feel sorry for them for being so close-minded and pathetic. And angry, too. But thankfully, I think the future will eventually be on the side of equality for my fellow LGBT people.

I can’t tell you how many times in the past week I’ve heard people saying “I’m not getting the H1N1 vaccine - it’s too dangerous”. To which I have said that I will not feel any sympathy whatsoever when they get sick from it. I know, I’m a horrible person. But it pisses me off that so many people are willing to wager OTHER PEOPLE’S HEALTH because they are ignorant.

I’ve seen a fair number of claims to the contrary with respect to the 1918 pandemic bug and H1N1. In some cases (and I don’t know if molecular types know exactly why) a flu virus will tickle the immune system of an otherwise healthy person in just the wrong way, leading to a massive inflammatory response. Which is pretty much the last thing you want in your lungs, where inflammation leads to necrosis, which leads to more inflammation and goodbye. That’s why the decision charts that are being published for H1N1 tell people to call 911 if a patient has any trouble breathing. asp web hosting

Ordinary flu kills the weak, the very young and the old (as I understand it) by being pretty much the last straw.  But in some cases it appears that H1N1 kills by a different mechanism, and that’s what has the public health people freaked out. free host

Also: because of the way viruses reproduce (hijacking other cells to pump out copies) there’s typically very little error-correction unlimited domain hosting. So even within a strain like H1N1 there may be endless tiny variations.