• Anecdotal 'evidence' is not evidence in any meaningful qua scientific sense. Otherwise Jenny McCarthy would be a Nobel prize winner. (As it stands, she's merely an Ignoble Prize winner.)
• Those who claim they got the flu after having been vaccinated fall into various camps:
- They actually didn't have the flu but rather a head cold (rhinovirus). In most cases no laboratory confirmation of which virus(es) were involved was carried out.
- If they actually developed the flu (demonstrated by laboratory confirmation), it is likely that they were already harboring it when they were vaccinated; ergo too late for the flu vaccine to be value.
• Those who claim to have gotten the flu after skipping the shot might or might not have benefited from receiving same. No sensible research is possible in this arena.
• The only ethical research which could tease out all the ramifications of flu shot vs no flu shot is observational, whereas the 'gold standard' for definitive results is prospective research, which would involve designed-in human health risks (some of which would lead to fatalities), which is decidedly unethical. Of course, we could return to days of yesteryear and perform such on unwilling subjects (eg, prisoners) to get our data, but that in itself would introduce experimental biases which would vitiate the results.
• The vaccine manufacturers and the WHO have provided considerably more than a yeoman's service in delineating and defining the influenza issues. And, as illustrated in the articles I referred to, science is about to make a major breakthrough in subduing the influenza threat which will ultimately make annual flu shots a thing of the past.
