To shoot or not to shoot

In the US, we are expecting H1N1 (“Swine Flu") vaccines to be available this fall. In the Skeptic magazine Harriet Hall, MD, exposes a bunch of fradulent claims about the effects of such a vaccine. Read Swine Flu Vaccine Fearmongering.

The vaccine will be offered to

• Pregnant women
• Household contacts and caregivers for children younger than 6 months of age
• Healthcare and emergency medical services personnel
• All people from 6 months through 24 years of age
• Persons aged 25 through 64 years who have health conditions associated with higher risk of medical complications from influenza.

One claim I find particularly interesting is the one that doing something contrary to nature is bad.

Claim: [Joseph] Mercola says “Injecting organisms into your body to provoke immunity is contrary to nature.”

Fact: Nature kills people. Doing something contrary to nature is what medicine is all about. It’s a good thing.

Generally, whether our actions are contrary to nature or not is insufficient argument to determine whether we should carry them out or not. Death from disease is natural, yet we try to prevent it. The use of DDT in agriculture is unnatural, and we try to prevent it (c.f. Stockholm Convention).

The article ends with a really funny one:

[One] person pointed out that shots hurt and that alone should tell you something. “Yet you are willing to trust these people with your lives to make a vaccine that the Creator never intended the human body should need, and let them inject it into your body? You people are scary or insane!”

Shots hurt, and that should tell me... what? Love hurts. Diarrhea hurts. Physical therapy hurts. As for the “Creator" who created Loa loa, I really don't see how anything he supposedly did^* could have any bearing on what we should do.


Loa loa in a human eyeball.

* As the most casual readers of this blog will know, I don't believe in any form of a creator (and yet I hate his actions intensely).