Are Flu And Anti-viral Vaccines Ineffective? Is Any Perceived Benefit A Statistical Sampling Error?

Jackson’s [Lisa Jackson, physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center] findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”

Read the complete November 2009, Atlantic magazine article, "Does the Vaccine Matter?" by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer.

How much other health care is ineffective? What does the study portend for expanding health insurance coverage to those who voluntarily choose not to insure themselves? Will the US extend health care without seeing any population health benefits?