A physician takes his flu vaccine under protest
Doug McGuff, MD | Physician | November 27, 2012
To hospital administration,
I am writing this letter to inform you that when I take my mandated influenza vaccine I will be doing so under protest and with the understanding that failure to do so could result in loss of my ability to earn income for myself and my family. Unfortunately, I do not qualify for any of the exemptions allowed by our facility. Since I am not religious, I have no religious objections, I am not allergic, and I have never had Guillane-Barre as a result of a flu vaccine. My objection to the vaccine is based on rational evidence and moral indignation.
From the standpoint of rational evidence, I was amused that Dr. Eric Kasowski (of the CDC?s influenza division) in his position paper ?Healthcare Workers Must Be Vaccinated Against Influenza? cited no research papers. This is very unusual given that this is a document directed at health care professionals. No papers were cited to support this statement because there are no such papers. The gold standard for evidence-based decision making in health care comes from The Cochrane Collaboration. This group of experts makes recommendations on all aspects of medicine and science based on a pooling of the best research studies and with a strict avoidance of all commercial or coercive interests.
In their paper titled ?Vaccines to prevent influenza in healthy adults? the Cochrane group concluded, ?In average conditions 100 people need to be vaccinated to avoid one set of influenza symptoms. Vaccine use did not affect the number of people hospitalized or working days lost but caused one case of Guillane-Barre syndrome for every one million vaccinations. Fifteen of the 36 trials were funded by vaccine companies and four had no funding declaration. Our results may be an optimistic estimate because company-sponsored influenza vaccine trials tend to produce results favorable to their products and some of the evidence comes from trials carried out in ideal viral circulation and matching conditions and because the harms evidence base is limited.? This is hardly compelling evidence....
