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There *are* real concerns with some flu vaccines: http://www.theage.com.au/national/residu...00501-u0dd.html But, again, its about understanding the science and the real risk, and about making better vaccines, not about just avoiding vaccination. As mentioned, life expectancies have almost doubled in the past century, and that is very largely owed to vaccines.

Exactly! I was being sarcastic: vaccines have made our lives massively safer, better and longer, and uninformed opposition to vaccines is badly endangering that. The flu vaccine is a different kind of issue, because the flu mutates more quickly than some of those other diseases, and is usually less fatal. But uninformed opposition to the flu vaccine easily extends to other vaccines. *Informed* opposition to the flu vaccine I'm fine with: but it *does* work, so to say 'placebo effect' is... uninformed.

I agree too, but a stronger scientific case is valuable. The comments on sodium chloride in the original post are just laughable from a scientific perspective. And, as the video I linked to shows, there was one badly conducted study that suggested a possible link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism, and there have since been a large number of well conducted studies that have showed there is no connection at all. Lots of guilt by association with things like Gulf War Syndrome, very little solid science. "Test all things, hold fast to what is good" applies to this kind of stuff too. By the way, I can completely accept and stand behind someone's decision not to routinely take the seasonal flu vaccine... but the evidence would need to be higher quality than that presented in that original post.

You know what, Richard, if you eat junk food and commercially raised meat and dairy products, you are putting a whole lot more toxins into your system on a regular basis than you could ever get from vaccines. I'd be more concerned about the impact of those things on your health. I subscribe to Mike Adams, the Health Ranger's, newsletters. But he is a fanatical conspiracy theorist, & I take everything he says with a grain of salt. Sometimes a very big grain. One of the ideas he has repeated many times is that diseases increase in vaccinated populations. I don't buy that. When I was a child, everybody got measles, mumps, chicken pox, and rubella, during childhood. I know of not a single case of any of those disease, except chicken pox, occurring in any of my children, my friends' children, or my own & my friends' grandchildren. The soil of the farm I grew up on contained the tetanus bacillus. Every time one of us stepped on a nail or something, my parents took us to get a tetanus shot. Not a one of us ever got lockjaw, but some of our cattle did. They died. We're all still here. Last night, I chatted with a young internet friend from Mexico. He said that where he was born, there was no polio vaccine. He got polio when he was three. Thankfully, he didn't get it so badly that he couldn't breathe, or he wouldn't be here anymore. A few years later, his family came to the US to get treatment for him, and he is no longer confined to a wheelchair. Polio was a serious problem in this country in centuries past. In my entire lifetime up to last night, I have only personally met one person who had ever had polio. She was my parents' age. I have no use for the flu shot, because it's not very effective, and has a history of side effects that are often worse than the flu itself. That has been confirmed in the experience of a sister in law who's an RN working with geriatric patients. But I wouldn't be so quick to jump on the anti-vaccination bandwagon.

I am getting my flu shot this year, and have done so every year since I started medical school. I used to get the flu regularly every winter in high school, but not once since I started having the shot. In my experience, the same people who go around spreading graphic warnings about the horrible chemicals in vaccines are the same ones who shout the loudest about how "they" (the government? doctors? who?) should have "done something" to prevent it if people die of preventable infections. AJ