Flu Shots!?!

[Doc]

And as much as I love to bash the profit-hungry drug companies, there are massive reporting systems in place these days because of exactly that kind of thing (DDT, Thalidomide etc.) to try and discover Bad Consequences while they are still in their infancy. Because there's some stuff you honestly won't notice until 100,000 people have taken your drug because it's so rare and there's no practical way to look for that until it's on the market.

Vaccines as a general principle have been around for ages now though, so if there was something fundamentally wrong with them we'd probably have noticed, doesn't mean there can't be anything wrong with specific preparations and so on though.

[jaydub]

With all that talk of 'herd immunity' earlier in the thread, it makes me wonder what changed around here to have something like Whooping Cough spike back up...

You're only a few miles from pinhead central with Jenny McCarthy and the antivaxers.

[Asherdan]

Don't remind me, I'll get the vapors thinking on that too long.

[AugustWest]

And as much as I love to bash the profit-hungry drug companies, there are massive reporting systems in place these days because of exactly that kind of thing (DDT, Thalidomide etc.) to try and discover Bad Consequences while they are still in their infancy. Because there's some stuff you honestly won't notice until 100,000 people have taken your drug because it's so rare and there's no practical way to look for that until it's on the market.

Vaccines as a general principle have been around for ages now though, so if there was something fundamentally wrong with them we'd probably have noticed, doesn't mean there can't be anything wrong with specific preparations and so on though.

Here's a can for reasonableness and informativeness.

[theinevitable]

oh man, now I am thinking about a Personal Thing where someone refuses to take certain medications because they know someone who had a bad reaction. "____ kills people" even though that person didn't die, and there is no reason to think that the drug is unsafe, and they clearly have testing in place to make sure that that drug does not kill people.

[Asherdan]

"So does not taking ____" is my usual answer to that kinda stuff.

[Nabubrush]

oh man, now I am thinking about a Personal Thing where someone refuses to take certain medications because they know someone who had a bad reaction. "____ kills people" even though that person didn't die, and there is no reason to think that the drug is unsafe, and they clearly have testing in place to make sure that that drug does not kill people.

It's the opposite of "Grampa smoked like a chimney and he lived to 108".