Skipping the vaccine line
Statistics show that a good many of you have sat up and paid attention—and the CDC is none too thrilled about it. In fact, they're disappointed in your negligent behavior. But I couldn't be happier.
According to their calculations, you and a number of your friends and neighbors aren't rolling up your sleeves for CDC-recommended adult vaccines.
The CDC is especially concerned about their offerings of the shingles, whooping cough and cervical cancer vaccines, which haven't hit the numbers they'd hoped for.
Here's how the turn-out for these vaccines has panned out:
Shingles: In its first year on the market, only 2 percent of folks age 60 and older got the vaccine.
Whooping cough: Just 2 percent of folks between the ages of 18 and 64 got a booster vaccine when it was approved in 2005.
HPV: Only 10 percent of women recommended to have this shot (ages 18 to 26) had received at least one shot of the three-vaccination series.
Those aren't the only low numbers. Here's a couple that have been in the arsenal that a lot of people have passed on:
What ever could be the problem? Maybe it's the nasty mix of unnatural chemicals that they want you to submit to being injected directly into your body? I can't imagine why people wouldn't be coming out in droves and lining up for such an opportunity!
As I wrote about in my newsletter just a year ago, when the shingles vaccine first came out, it was found to only work half the time for people ages 60 to 69. And in people over 70—the age most at risk, the vaccine's "success" rate was a mere 38 percent. (Hardly a raging success.) Directly countering the overblown hoopla, the study showed that the vaccine was no better than the placebo at preventing deaths, hospitalizations, total use of pain medications, and daily functioning capability.
The jury is still out on what the long-term side effects might be from this new vaccine. It hasn't been out nearly long enough for us to know—and the drug companies want you to be the pincushion and guinea pig that will ultimately determine that.
Hey, you were just trying to avoid the misery of shingles, right? Not sign up for a lab experiment that's using your body as a Petri dish.
And that's just one of my many beefs with any of these newer vaccines. They haven't passed what I consider to be the seven-year safety mark. Until a vaccine has been out at least this long, the inevitable kinks have yet to be worked out.
Continue to skip 'em until they've passed that time test.
