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Listed below are comments made by DisgustedOfMitcham2 between Sunday, 22nd November 2009 and Tuesday, 24th November 2009 (15 Hours Ago) .

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• Vaccine batch 'put on hold' in Canada 5:11pm on 24 Nov 2009 I must say I'm pretty impressed with GSK's response here. Anaphylactic reactions are a known, but very rare side effect of vaccination, so you'd always expect to see one or two.
  
  To identify that there is a problem after just 6 cases shows that the systems in place for monitoring vaccine safety must be working very well.
• Person-to-person spread of Tamiflu-resistant strain of swine flu 2:57pm on 24 Nov 2009 Thanks for educating me about high-pathogenic and low-pathogenic variants of H5N1, sensibleoldgrannie, I hadn't realised that those two types existed. For anyone else who's interested, there's a useful article here.
• Person-to-person spread of Tamiflu-resistant strain of swine flu 10:22am on 24 Nov 2009 #159, echofloripa:
  
  So, you have details of one person who died in the UK after receiving swine flu vaccine, and that death, according to the article you linked, was likely to be related to the patient's underlying health condition rather than the vaccine.
  
  So in fact we probably have zero deaths attributable to the vaccine.
  
  Now, how many people have died of swine flu?
  
  Are you seriously saying that you think the risk of death from the vaccine is greater than the risk of death from swine flu?
  
  And as for long-lasting side effects, am I right in thinking that what you are saying is that you have no evidence whatsoever that there are long-lasting side effects, but you personally believe that there might be?
  
  So again, you'd rather take flu, which we know has a risk of long-lasting side effects, than the vaccine, for which there is no evidence of long-lasting side effects?
• Person-to-person spread of Tamiflu-resistant strain of swine flu 2:56pm on 23 Nov 2009 Oh, another thing, echofloripa:
  
  The idea that vitamin D3 protects against flu is an interesting idea, but it's far from scientifically proven. Maybe it will turn out to be useful, but I don't think it's sensible to rely on an unproven therapy that may or may not work, when we have vaccines, which we know are effective.
• Person-to-person spread of Tamiflu-resistant strain of swine flu 2:49pm on 23 Nov 2009 #151:
  
  "It is not worth if you risk killing hundreds or even thousands of innocent lives. Without mentioning of the lifelasting suffering of the side effects."
  
  And your evidence that flu vaccination risks killing people or having long-lasting side effects is...?
• Under-fives to be offered swine flu vaccine 2:44pm on 23 Nov 2009 #73, echofloripa
  
  So what exactly do you think the risks of the vaccine are? Please cite evidence for your answer.
  
  You mention thimerosal: there is actually no good evidence that thimerosal is harmful at the doses used in vaccines. In fact there's plenty of evidence that it's not harmful: for example, here, here, or here.
  
  As for "esqualene", by which I assume you mean "squalene", that's something that's naturally present in the human body as part of our usual metabolism, so it's hard to believe that a couple of extra mg of it is going to pose any significant risk.
  
  I'm intrigued by your statement that more than half the doctors in the UK said they wouldn't take the vaccine. Where does that figure come from?
• Person-to-person spread of Tamiflu-resistant strain of swine flu 2:13pm on 23 Nov 2009 #140, Define_real:
  
  It's true that swine flu is a mild disease from which you make a swift and complete recovery in most cases.
  
  However, for some unlucky folks, it can be a lot more serious. Some people have died. That is why vaccination is so important. Most people wouldn't have had any serious complications from swine flu anyway, but even if vaccination saves just a handful of lives, isn't that worth doing?
• Under-fives to be offered swine flu vaccine 2:03pm on 23 Nov 2009 I've just realised, Risa, that I do know of a piece of medical research which is entirely consistent with your commission vs omission theory. An interesting study was published in 2006, which showed that if a doctor had recently had a patient on warfarin who had suffered a bleeding event (a serious side effect of warfarin), they were less likely to prescribe warfarin to subsequent patients. That, I guess, is not surprising. However, if they had a patient who had a stroke while not on warfarin (which the warfarin might have prevented), then they were no more likely to prescribe warfarin subsequently.
  
  That seems entirely consistent with the idea that they gave greater weight to bad things that happened as a result of an act of commission than they did to bad things that happened as a result of an act of omission.
  
  Very interesting.
• Reasons to be careful 1:49pm on 23 Nov 2009 #33, Richard Shaw:
  
  As for your first point, I don't think this is important here. Yes, jrperry's maths made the assumption of large numbers, but the poll included 1006 respondents, which is quite large enough that a gaussian distribution becomes a reasonable assumption.
  
  As for the assumption about independent samples, you're right that the labour and conservative votes are negatively correlated, but presenting a 1-sigma error isn't quite comparing like with like: the 3% error figures quoted originally are 95% confidence intervals. The 95% confidence interval, assuming your 1-sigma errors are correct (and my calculations agree with yours!), would therefore be about 5%.
  
  So if I'm right about that, then the true margin of error (ie 95% confidence interval is half way between Nick and jrperry's figures).
  
  In other words, we can be 95% certain that the true difference between Labour and Conservative, among people who are similar to those included in the latest poll (and that last bit is the really big assumption), is between 1 and 11%.
• Under-fives to be offered swine flu vaccine 4:17pm on 22 Nov 2009 Risa, I think you may have come up with a very profound insight:
  
  "From my background in philosophy, I can tell you that many folks weight acts/risks of commission (actively doing something, like vaccinating) more than acts/risks of omission (no action; no vaccinating)."
  
  I don't know of any evidence to support that (perhaps you do?), but actually it does sound very plausible, and does fit in with a lot of what we observe about human behaviour every day.
  
  So assuming that that's true (and I'm quite prepared to believe that it is), then that really explains a lot. It would explain why someone, who may be faced with small risks of vaccinating and greater risks of not vaccinating, chooses not to vaccinate, simply because the risk of the act of commission (ie vaccinating) have the greater weight.
  
  Thanks for articulating that so clearly!

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