Woman Disabled by Flu Shot Reaction

I know it seems that way, but it doesn't. Sometimes a kid who seemed perfectly healthy will die playing high schooll basketball. What triggered this? Some genetic condition that made his heart muscle thick that goofed up the conduction of electrical impulse through his heart. The death could have happened during basketball, or while running to catch a bus. It's not the basketball game or the bus that was at fault.

You know nothing about dystonia. Unfortunately, experts don't know much more about what causes it. There are a lot of bad diseases and conditions out there, including MS, ALS, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, etc. etc., where we just don't know the causes. You can spook all you want about this thing did it or that thing "obviously" is what brought it on, but basically, we just don't know.

So how does science establish this? By looking at thousands of patients, and then crunching the numbers. For example, Guillain-Barre paralysis is another weird disease that no one knows the cause to. But this has been associated with vaccines, though rarely. As far as I know, dystonia has not, other than in case reports like this, where it's anyone's guess if the link was causal, or just 2 things happening one after the other.

There are 300 million people in the US. Say one of them develops dystonia every week, for 52 new cases each year. Now it's suddenly flu season, and say 20% of the population is getting vaccinated. So one person happens to get dystonia a week after being vaccinated. Now it's front page news, and the vaccine "caused" this. If you want to believe this sort of thing, go for it, but it's not much beyond Salem in 1692, where someone got sick and the townsfolk blamed the old lady living on a hill as being a witch who cursed the patient. Burn the vaccines!

The reason drug companies want to be shielded from prosecution is because people on juries, especially those in medical malpractice lawsuits, usually aren't very sophisticated, and they often make decisions with their hearts instead of their brains. So a woman like this will be wheeled in, with difficulty talking, everyone will have a good cry, and the jury will come up with a recommendation that the pharma company is liable for 100 million dollars. Happens all the time. You can't tell the jury that statistically or scientifically there's no link between the vaccine and the event. The jury will not be able to weigh the testimony of experts, and the defense will pull in some expert for hire who will come up with some bogus BS. Unless people have had training in science and math and statistics, they will go with the heartbreaking tale of woe and not the facts. They figure - well, the lady was injured, so someone has to pay.

The pharma companies are between a rock and a hard place. They have to develop new vaccines every year, since the flu virus is mutating. So there's not a lot of time for testing for either efficacy or safety, though they basically cook up the vaccines pretty much the same way year after year. This is why a few years back, almost every pharma company in the country got out of making vaccines. Yes, there is money to be made, but a few 100 million dollar lawsuits, and all the profit goes up in smoke very quickly, and it's even more irritating if you're getting sued and you've basically done nothing wrong.

So be careful in what you wish for. Maybe one day the "evil" pharma companies will just fold up shop, stop developing new drugs, and pull up stakes. And you can drink your herbal tea and take your vitamin D and hope for the best. (Hey, I take vitamin D and herbal tea myself, and don't take any pharma drugs). I'm just trying to give both sides a fair shake. The people who work for these companies are not evil. Many are trying to help mankind. They're not actively trying to hurt or kill you. The pharma companies do want to make a profit. There's nothing wrong with that. Otherwise, it's like what we had in the Soviet Union with no one taking any initiative or risk.