During the course of your research, have you run into any substantive data regarding people who stopped taking the vaccine once they'd begun?
It seems to me that such info, if available, must be considered when making a decision on behalf of a person who will someday be enabled to reverse that decision.
The vaccine is NOT cumulative. Flu, like many ... viruses is characterized by its ability to mutate rapidly into new strains that are either immune to or do not trigger release of the antibodies that worked before. So, other than the preservatives and the inert carrier the contents change every year based on the best medical estimates of what particular strains will predominate in the forthcoming flu season. So the efficacy of this year's flu shot this year is independent of the previous year's vaccine and the efficacy of next year's vaccine is independent of this year's.
That is why it is highly unlikely any study such as you suggest would have been conducted and if it had been conducted the results would arguably be meaningless.
What
he said.
And I refer again to the 2 articles cited in post
#50369 which deal substantially with those issues.
Responding to both you and joemike...
All that's been said here and in all the sources I've looked at does no more than
suggest that stopping taking the vaccine
shouldn't put you at greater risk of getting the flu that year or down the road, but I've seen nothing that flat out says so, and for that reason, combined with the number of people who've told me over the years that they got the flu after skipping the shot, I'm astonished that neither the "experts" nor the "crackpots" have undertaken a study, particularly considering the amount of money that's available in this country for - let's be polite and say -
dubious research. (I'm not the greatest researcher, but I've thrown the question at Google in a bunch of different ways, and if such a study has been conducted, Google hasn't found it.)
And further, I'll argue that there's absolutely no basis for thinking that consistent results of such a study would be any less meaningful than the consistent results of any other study; they may fly in the face of logic, but rather than negating them, it would make them all the more intriguing.
And add to the equation the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has been historically and notoriously shortsighted about drug testing, and the medical profession has marched in lockstep, and if that doesn't ring a bell, ask a Thalidomide baby, an early cortisone taker, or a woman who's suffered second(?) generational cervical(?) cancer (among many others).
