Pediatric deaths from influenza (current week circled in red), reported to CDC

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There's this: Each week during flu season, the Center for Disease Control publishes the results of national flu surveillance data and gives us an idea of how things are going. This happens to be a moderately severe flu season, and the chart above, from Friday's data, illustrates pediatric deaths from flu–nine this week alone, 29 so far this year.

And then, alas, there's this noted in Salon:

The Daily Beast’s shameful anti-vaccine rant

Radio yakker Don Imus' wife given space for a fact-free anti-flu shot diatribe

Influenza is a killer. While estimates vary, the best guesstimate is that thousands of adults along with as many as hundreds of kids die from flu and influenza-related pneumonia each year.

In theory, influenza is preventable. In practice, the flu vaccine isn't as efficacious as one would desire, but it does work over 60% of the time (more in younger patients) and is universally accepted by clinicians and public health professionals as a worthy endeavor for the public to participate in, and one of the best tools, in addition to hand washing and staying away from sick people.

Salon.com

He still considers himself a “a pro-vaccine guy,” Dr. Osterholm said. “I say, ‘Use this vaccine,’ ” he said. “The safety profile is actually quite good. But we have oversold it. Use it — but just know it’s not going to work nearly as well as everyone says.”

What do recent vaccine effectiveness studies show?

Preliminary data for the 2010-2011 influenza season indicate that influenza vaccine effectiveness was about 60% for all age groups combined, and that almost all influenza viruses isolated from study participants were well-matched to the vaccine strains (Unpublished CDC data). A randomized study (by Monto et al [137 KB, 8 pages]) looking at the 2007-2008 influenza season found trivalent inactivated vaccine (flu shot) protected 7 out of 10 people from influenza illness. Studies show that LAIV works about as well as the flu shot. The main study that led to the licensure of LAIV was one conducted in children that showed that LAIV protected up to 9 out of 10 children vaccinated against the flu. A recent meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials of LAIV in children found that 2 doses of LAIV in vaccine-naïve children prevented infection with 77% of antigenically similar viruses and 72% of all viruses regardless of antigenic similarity.

Michael Osterholm at Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy released a recent report decrying the tendency to overhype the effectiveness, nonetheless adding:The CDC concurs Those are the basics on efficacy.

Want safety data, including on thimerosal? Go here and here.

So, how does the Daily Beast handle the issue? By having Dierdre Imus, expert in nothing, infer and imply that flu vaccines don't work and are dangerous.

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