Shooting the Flu

Readers of last year’s posts about the flu vaccines occasionally available to the public in this country will recall that I’m a bit skeptical about the whole thing – not because I’m a raving skeptic about most things (although I am) and not because I personally can’t use flu vaccines because I appear to be allergic to the compounds used to create them (although I am), but rather because just about every flu season we are confronted with stories about artificial shortages of vaccine, random pricing for flu shots (with as much as 400% price variance reported) or vaccines that don’t appear to work on this year’s strain of flu. It’s reading these stories in the news that makes the whole process so difficult to take seriously…

Now, it has often been pointed out to me that I lack any training in biology or medicine, and it’s probably unfair of me to judge this process on a purely business basis. This year’s story about the flu vaccines being off-target in Canada, which was sent out by The Canadian Press this week, demonstrates the point. Apparently there are three different families of virus circulating, each with many different specific strains, any of which may not be effectively controlled by any one specific iteration of the vaccine. It might be possible to combine multiple iterations of the vaccine into a single shot, but the story goes on to say that this might not help (you’d still need to get the specific iteration to kill the specific bug that’s attacking your system), but it would dramatically increase both the level of difficulty experienced in making the vaccine and the cost we’d be charged for it…

From a business standpoint, of course, the idea of a preventative product that costs a lot of money, can easily make you as sick as the disease it is intended to prevent all by itself, and has an excellent chance of not working in the first place seems so absurd that you’d have to wonder why anyone is even allowed to sell it. From a medical standpoint the concept of a treatment that has a nonzero chance of preventing a debilitating (and occasionally fatal) illness from infecting the patient is a wonderful thing, particularly when you consider all of the debilitating (and occasionally fatal) diseases for which there is no such preventative, and the possibility of the shots not working is a non-issue, since the field can never offer an absolute guarantee, anyway. From a consumer standpoint, it probably comes down to a judgment call…

If you’re one of those people in the high risk group, the chance of having to deal with a mild reaction to the flu shot is probably worth avoiding a severe reaction to the virus (e.g. several weeks in bed, pain and weakness, occasionally death); if you’re young, vigorous, disease-resistant or all of the above, it might not be, and if you’re allergic to flu shots then the whole matter is irrelevant. The point is that this is another one of those decisions that can not be made on a cost-benefit basis, or indeed, on any type of business basis. As absurd as it might seem to purchase a product on the terms offered for flu vaccines, the idea of letting an insurance or health care company make that decision for its customers on a cost-benefit basis is completely repugnant...

In the long run, if you want to take your chances on a flu shot that may or may not even work on the strain of flu you encounter, that should be your choice, and you shouldn’t be thwarted by profit-seeking insurance companies or pharmaceutical laboratories that can’t seem to make enough vaccine to last through the winter without accidentally tainting a huge lot of it. I’m just going to keep warm and take a lot of vitamin C…