Vaccines Show Surprising Link To Reduced Risk Of Alzheimer’s

Well, the anti-vaccine community is not going to like this one.

A growing body of evidence, buttressed by a new report out last month, shows that people who are vaccinated have a significantly lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

Yes, that’s right: in addition to the obvious benefit of protecting you from infections, multiple different vaccines have now been shown, in two large studies, to be associated with fewer cases of Alzheimer’s.

How big is the effect? Well, the earlier study, published about a year ago, looked at the flu vaccine. Scientists from the University of Texas Health Science Center, led by neurologist Paul Schulz, collected data on more than 1.8 million older patients from around the U.S., of whom half had received the flu vaccine and half had not. Their average age was 74 years, and the scientists examined health records for four subsequent years to see how many developed signs of Alzheimer’s in that time.

In the vaccinated group, nearly 48,000 patients (out of 936,000) developed Alzheimer’s during the four-year follow-up period, about 5.1% of all patients. That might sound like a lot, but in the unvaccinated patients, nearly 80,000 developed Alzheimer’s. To put it another way, patients who got the flu vaccine had a 40% lower risk of Alzheimer’s, 5.1% versus 8.5%.

It appears this benefit isn’t specific to the flu vaccine, though. In the newer study published this September, the same group from the University of Texas looked at three more vaccines: the Tdap vaccine (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis), the shingles vaccine and the pneumococcus vaccine. They were able to collect records on 1.65 million people, among whom more than 500,000 had received one or more of the vaccines. All of the patients were over 65 years old.

Remarkably, all three of the vaccines showed similar and quite significant benefits against Alzheimer’s disease. In an eight-year follow-up period, the risk of Alzheimer’s was 30% lower (7.2% versus 10.2%) in patients who had the Tdap vaccine versus those who hadn’t. For the shingles vaccine, the reduction in risk was 25%, 8.1% versus 10.7%. And for the pneumococcal vaccine, the risk was 27% lower, 7.9% versus 10.9%.

(Note that this study looked at the older shingles vaccine. The newer one, Shingrix, has only been widely available since 2017. The scientists hypothesize that the newer vaccine, because it’s more effective against shingles, may provide even greater protection against Alzheimer’s.)

So how might this work? Is Alzheimer’s caused by an infection, and the vaccines prevent Alzheimer’s by preventing the infection? Well, the short answer is no, probably not. Although we don’t know the cause of Alzheimer’s, we don’t have any strong evidence that it’s the direct result of an infection.

Furthermore, with data showing that at least four different vaccines offer similar levels of protection against Alzheimer’s, the evidence indicates that the effect cannot be specific to the flu vaccine, or the Tdap vaccine, or with any of the other vaccines or their ingredients.

The University of Texas group that published the study speculated that vaccines might work to protect against Alzheimer’s by “long-term reprogramming of innate immune cells,” also called “trained immunity.” This hypothesis is far too complex to try to explain here–and it involves immunology, which I don’t really understand myself and which is “absurdly intricate” as science writer Ed Yong put it. So let’s just say that this is an intriguing idea that needs more research.

And for anyone who thinks that getting an infection and recovering (instead of getting vaccinated) might offer the same benefit, that doesn’t seem to work: another study looked at precisely this question and found no connection between the number of influenza infections and the risk of Alzheimer’s. So the vaccine seems to confer a benefit that the disease itself does not. (I mention this because a popular–but wrong–claim of anti-vaccine activists is that you get better immunity from infection by catching the disease and then recovering. Not a good idea.)

Also, I have to add that these studies report correlation, not causation. So even though the effects are large and significant, we don’t know for certain that vaccines do something to directly prevent Alzheimer’s. Maybe people who get vaccinated also have other behaviors that help them avoid Alzheimer’s–although the study design tried to minimize this possibility.

Vaccines have enormous, extensively documented benefits: they prevent suffering and disease, and they’ve saved countless millions of lives. And now it appears that they offer something else: a lower risk of Alzheimer’s. So if you haven’t received your boosters, now you have one more reason to get them.

We may get a universal flu vaccine, thanks to mRNA technology

The mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 are an amazing story: a new vaccine developed in a matter of weeks for a brand-new virus, SARS-CoV-2, at the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020. Clinical trials moved forward at record speed, and by December of that year we had an approved vaccine that was safe and over 90% effective against Covid-19.

Why not use this mRNA technology for other vaccines, especially for the flu? When I asked this question last year, I didn’t realize that a group of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania were already hard at work making this idea a reality. They’ve just published their first results, and the news is very encouraging.

But first, some background. Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology was the big breakthrough behind the Covid-19 vaccines. Invented by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania, the idea is, at its core, very simple: take the genetic code for a protein from the virus (any protein can be used, and for Covid-19 this protein is called Spike), and inject it into someone’s arm. (The genetic code I’m referring to here is the mRNA that encodes the protein.) From there, the cells of the human host manufacture the protein–not too much, though, because mRNA quickly degrades once it’s in your body.

What’s kind of amazing is that the human immune system will then recognize the Spike protein as an invader, and generate antibodies against it. From that point on, the person who received the vaccine will be prepared to fight off a real infection by Covid-19. In other words, they’ll be immunized.

The actual development of this technology was much more complicated than I’m describing here. First, you can’t just inject mRNA without causing a lot of inflammation, which can be dangerous. Weissman and Karikó solved that problem by using chemically modified mRNA. Second, you need to package the mRNA in something; the scientists discovered that they could use little packages of fat molecules called liposomes to make an effective container. Eventually, they got it to work, and the rest is (recent) history. Both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines use mRNA technology.

Now about this new “universal” flu vaccine, and why it’s so much better than what we currently use. The annual flu shot contains pieces of one protein from 4 different influenza strains. Each year, as the flu itself evolves, the 4 strains used in the flu vaccine are fine-tuned in an effort to keep up. In some years, this effort fails and the vaccine just doesn’t work very well, for reasons I explained here.

One huge problem is that the current flu vaccine process grows the flu virus in chicken eggs, and sometimes the darned thing just won’t grow! So in those years, the vaccine manufacturers must switch to another flu strain, one not as well-matched to what’s circulating. The result is a vaccine that sort of sucks, although it’s usually better than nothing.

With mRNA, you don’t have to grow anything in chicken eggs, and you aren’t limited to just 4 strains. As the new research shows, you can put ALL 20 known influenza strains in the same vaccine, and it protects subjects against all of them. It even protects against other flu strains that weren’t in the vaccine. To create the vaccine, scientists simply synthesized the mRNA that encodes the surface protein of the flu, hemagglutinin, from 20 different flu strains. The synthesis process is already being done on an industrial scale for the Covid-19 vaccines, and the same process will work for any mRNA, from any virus.

In the new research, scientists at UPenn led by Scott Hensley and Drew Weissman (the co-inventor of the mRNA vaccine) inserted all 20 flu strains in a single vaccine. They found “that the vaccine dramatically reduced signs of illness and protected from death, even when the animals were exposed to flu strains different from those used in making the vaccine.”

Did I mention that the subjects in the new study were mice and ferrets, not people? Well, this experiment is just the beginning: we’ll need further trials to test the safety and efficacy of this vaccine in people. Those are much, much more costly, though, and it’s not clear when or even if those trials will happen.

If we had a universal flu vaccine, we might no longer need the annual flu shots that we beg everyone to get each year. So when can we expect to see this new 20-strain vaccine?

Well, there’s the rub. Even if this new flu vaccine works perfectly in human testing, we might never get it. At the moment, we are completely dependent on private companies to develop vaccines. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. created incentives for vaccine manufacturers by promising to buy millions of doses, and–fortunately–that worked. We’ve never tried anything like that with the flu vaccine.

We need to re-think our dependence on private, for-profit companies for this critically important public health technology. Perhaps it’s time for the government to step in and make sure we get this vaccine, whether through incentives like the ones used to create the Covid-19 vaccine, or through a direct effort by the government itself (as other countries have done) to create a universal flu vaccine. A universal flu vaccine will save tens of thousands of lives every year. Let’s hope we get there.

Why the new COVID vaccine boosters are safe and likely very effective

In case you haven’t heard, there’s now a new set of vaccine booster shots that protect against the latest variant of Covid-19, BA.5. This new variant is highly infectious, and the original vaccine doesn’t protect people against it as well as it protected against earlier variants.

Now, before someone takes that last sentence out of context, let me emphasize that the original Covid-19 vaccines are still highly effective at preventing severe disease and hospitalization. Anyone who isn’t vaccinated would be well-advised to get one of those, if that’s their only option.

But the new vaccines protect against two different strains of Covid-19: the original strand and the latest Omicron variant, BA.5. BA.5 just emerged in August, and it’s spreading extremely fast–it now accounts for 88% of the cases in the U.S. The FDA authorized these “bivalent” boosters on August 31.

My main point today is to explain how this happened so quickly, and why it didn’t involve many months of clinical trials the way that the original vaccines did. Some people have expressed suspicion about the speed with which these boosters appeared, but those suspicions are entirely unfounded.

First of all, we do have data showing that the new vaccine boosters are safe: a study showing these data for the Moderna booster just appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. That study also showed that people generated robust antibodies against the BA.1, BA.4, and BA.5 Omicron variants after getting the new booster.

Second, to explain why that’s all the data we need, let me explain something about the flu vaccine. Many people are well aware that we have a new influenza vaccine every year–but what they might not know is that each year’s vaccine contains a different strain of the flu virus from the previous year. (Actually, it has up to four different strains, and any or all of them could be new.)

And yet we don’t run large, months-long clinical trials of the flu vaccine each year to measure it’s efficacy. Why not? Well, the basic designs of the flu vaccines (there’s more than one) have been tested in large clinical trials, and we know they’re safe. Replacing the vaccine strain with a new one doesn’t affect the safety of the vaccine, as decades of experience with the flu vaccine have now demonstrated. And because flu mutates quickly, we need to change the vaccine strain every year if we want the vaccine to work.

So that’s what we do: we change the flu vaccine strain to match whatever seems to be circulating, but everything else about the vaccine design remains the same.

This is exactly what scientists have done with the new Covid-19 booster shots from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna: they simply added a new strain, in this case to match the latest Omicron variant.

Both of the new boosters are mRNA vaccines, which means the vaccine contains a tiny bit of genetic code (mRNA) with instructions on how to make the “spike” protein from SARS-CoV-2, the Covid-19 virus. When you get the vaccine, your own cells follow those instructions to make a limited number of copies of the spike protein–but nothing else. The virus itself can’t be created without many other genes, and the spike protein alone can’t form a virus.

But your immune system recognizes that an invader is present–that spike protein–and it generates antibodies against it. After that, your immune system is primed to recognize and defeat Covid-19, if it ever infects you.

So the new boosters contain mRNA from the BA.5 spike protein as well as the original spike protein, and now you get protection from both old and new strains. Other than that, it’s the same vaccine as before.

The vaccine makers have produced safety data showing that the booster is just as safe as the original vaccine (see that NEJM article I mentioned above). But the FDA didn’t require them to prove that the booster really works better against BA.5, because that would require months of trials, and by that time the virus could mutate again. So while it’s possible that the boosters won’t help against BA.5, it’s very, very likely that they will.

One of the big advantages of mRNA vaccines is precisely this: we can swap out the mRNA easily, allowing us to respond quickly to mutations in circulating viruses. That’s a good thing, and it might be our only path to controlling Covid-19.

The bottom line is that the new boosters should be very safe, and they will likely provide much better protection against the current strains of the Covid virus. I’ve already gotten my booster, and I hope everyone else will too.

The mRNA vaccines are defeating COVID. Let's use them for the flu.

 

The last year has been a story of triumph in the vaccine world, with the rapid development of two highly successful vaccines for Covid-19, one developed by Moderna and the other by Pfizer and BioNTech. Now that flu season is approaching, why are we still using 50-year-old technology for the flu vaccine?

The reason the Covid-19 vaccines were developed so quickly is that they used a new, much faster and easier-to-create type of vaccine technology, based on messenger RNA, or mRNA. What’s even more exciting is that we now have an overwhelming amount of evidence, from real-world experience, that these vaccines are remarkably safe and effective.

Now, anti-vaxxers and the “vaccine hesitant” are claiming they don’t trust the vaccine because it was developed too fast. That’s ridiculous: the real reason they don’t trust the vaccine is because they’re consuming a steady diet of anti-vaccine nonsense, promoted by a combination of right-wing media and the Disinformation Dozen (who include left-wing as well as right-wing zealots). But let’s not go down that rabbit hole today.

So what is an mRNA vaccine? Here’s a brief explainer, and then we’ll look at the flu vaccine. (Note: feel free to skip ahead if you already understand the technology.)

Messenger RNA vaccines have been under development for decades, since long before Covid-19 appeared. The technology required a series of breakthroughs over the years, as described in a recent Nature news story, and many scientists contributed. It wasn’t used in vaccines in part because it wasn’t ready, but also because we rely on private companies to develop vaccines, and few of them were interested in investing in a new, not-yet-approved technology. But I digress.

Messenger RNA is the stuff that all of your cells use to translate your genes, which are encoded in DNA, into proteins. The basic process is that the DNA for a gene is copied into pieces of mRNA, where the DNA letters, ACGT, are replaced by slightly different (chemically) RNA letters, ACGU.

Every cell in your body is filled with mRNA, all the time. It’s the stuff of life, so of course it is totally safe. Each cell uses mRNA to make proteins, which do most of the actual work that keeps you alive.

Here’s the brilliant thing about mRNA vaccines: all they do is introduce some mRNA into your cells that encodes a single protein from the virus, which is called “Spike” in the case of the Covid-19 vaccines.

Your own cells then make the Spike protein, but they don’t make very much! They just make a few copies, because mRNA doesn’t last very long. And because there is no DNA copy of the Spike protein in your genome, once the mRNA in the vaccine breaks down, it’s gone forever.

The other brilliant thing is that your own immune system recognizes Spike as a foreign protein, and it generates cells that will recognize any future infections where the Spike protein is present. If you’re later infected by SARS-CoV-2 (the Covid-19 virus), your immune system is primed and ready, and in a large majority of cases it attacks and destroys the virus before you get sick.

So that’s it: an mRNA vaccine is simply a little package made of fat molecules (called liposomes) that contains a few copies of mRNA encoding a viral protein. There’s nothing to prevent us now from creating similar vaccines for the flu, or for other viruses where we need new vaccines. (In the case of flu, we can use mRNA for a gene called hemagglutinin, but again I digress.)

We make new flu vaccines every year, because the flu is constantly mutating. Most years, the flu vaccine isn’t a great match for the circulating strains of the virus, and therefore the vaccine isn’t very effective. In a good year it might be 60-70% effective, but in bad years it might be much worse. A big part of the problem comes from how we create the vaccine.

In the U.S., we make most of our flu vaccines by growing influenza viruses in chicken eggs. No, I’m not making this up. Around February of each year, a panel of experts selects 4 strains of the virus that they think will most likely match the viruses for the following flu season, which usually ramps up in November or December. (Here are this year’s choices.)

Once the experts have selected the vaccine strains, the manufacturing process begins, first by checking to see if all 4 strains will grow robustly in chicken eggs. If they don’t, the panel may have to switch to different strains that are less likely to work. No, I’m not kidding: the success of the flu vaccine depends on how well it grows in eggs. That’s one reason why, in some years, the flu vaccine is a flop. This would simply never happen if we used mRNA technology.

With mRNA vaccines, we don’t have to grow any viruses at all. The mRNA from a single gene–hemagglutinin for influenza–can simply be synthesized in large quantities, just as we’re now doing for the Spike protein in SARS-CoV-2. Or for an even more effective vaccine, we might add the gene for neuraminidase, the other protein in influenza that our immune system can “see.”

An mRNA vaccine for flu would be far cheaper to manufacture, not requiring huge chicken farms. (This year, 82% of flu doses in the U.S. were made this way.) Even more important, though, is that an mRNA vaccine for flu would likely be far more effective at controlling the severity of the infection itself.

Why aren’t we doing this already? Simply put, it’s because we rely on private companies to take the initiative, and it’s not worth it to them to test and validate an entirely new vaccine, which requires a substantial investment. There’s also a simple solution, the same one we used for Covid-19: the government should take the lead.

We’re now at the beginning of flu season, which almost disappeared last year thanks to our social distancing and masking behavior. I’ve had my flu shot, and millions more are being administered around the world. Just last week, an early report out of Europe indicated that the flu season this year might be “severe,” which is the last thing we need with Covid-19 still raging.

We don’t yet know if this year’s flu shot will be effective or not, but odds are, based on past performance, that it won’t be great. (It’s still much better than nothing, I should add.) If we want a better flu vaccine, now is the time to start developing a new one using mRNA. If private industry doesn’t step up, any one of dozens of countries have the expertise to do so instead.

The flu vaccine is working well this year. It's not too late to get it.

Current flu trends for 2018-19. Brown shows H1N1 strains,
red shows H3N2, and yellow indicates the strain was not
genotyped.

The flu is widespread and increasing right now, according to the CDC.  At least 42 states were reporting high levels of flu activity as of the end of December 2018, and the rates are still climbing. In other words, we're in the midst of flu season.

Other than that, though, the news is relatively good. Here's why.

First, the dominant strain of flu this year is H1N1, which is the "swine flu" that first appeared as a pandemic in 2009. But pandemics don't have to come with high mortality rates, and as it turned out–luckily for humankind–the 2009 flu was milder than the previous dominant strain, H3N2, which first appeared way back in 1968.

This season, nearly 90% of the flu cases tested by the CDC are turning out to be H1N1, the milder variety. Although 10% of people are still getting the much-nastier H3N2 flu, it's good news compared to last year, when H3N2 dominated.

Back to the bad news (although this is old news): the 2009 swine flu (H1N1) didn't completely displace the older flu strain. Instead, we now have both types of influenza circulating, along with two strains of the even milder influenza B virus. Since 2009, the flu vaccine has to combat all 4 of these flu viruses, which is why you might see the term "quadrivalent" associated with the vaccine. That just means it targets all 4 different strains.

Back to the good news again: the vaccine this year contains just the right strains! This doesn't always happen; actually it happens much less frequently than anyone would like. But now that the flu season is under way, the CDC can test the circulating flu viruses and compare them to the strains that are targeted by this year's vaccine. This year, both the H1N1 and the H3N2 viruses match the vaccine strains really well, which means that if you got the shot, you are likely to be very well protected.

(Keep in mind that even in a good year, the vaccine isn't 100% effective, and you can still get the flu. But you are much less likely to get it than anyone who is unvaccinated.)

While I've got your attention, let me answer one of the top 10 health questions of the year: "how long is the flu contagious?" According to the CDC,

• the flu is most contagious in the first 3-4 days after becoming sick.

It continues to be contagious for up to a week, so if you have the flu, stay home! And make sure those around you avoid physical contact, as much as possible, and wash their hands frequently.

And while I'm at it, let's debunk a common myth:

• No, you can't get the flu from the vaccine.

So if you've put off getting the flu vaccine, it's not too late! The season is in full swing, but if you get the vaccine today, you'll likely have excellent protection for the rest of the season. Go get it.

Scientists are creating a dangerous flu strain, just to prove they can

In an outrageous display of chutzpah, a group of flu researchers led by Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands announced today, in a letter to the journal Nature, that they were planning to engineer the new H7N9 avian flu strain to give it new, possibly much more deadly capabilities.  Fouchier is the same scientist who, two years ago, adapted the highly pathogenic H5N1 flu strain so that it could be passed from human to human, which it cannot do in its natural form.  The resulting outcry delayed publication of his paper, but it eventually did appear.

Now they want to do the same thing, and much more, with the new H7N9 influenza virus, which has killed 43 people in China to date, and which epidemiologists are tracking with great concern.

They should track Fouchier and his lab instead.

Wait a second, protests Fouchier.  He promises that

"All experiments proposed by influenza investigators are subject to review by institutional biosafety committees. The committees include experts in the fields of infectious disease, immunology, biosafety, molecular biology and public health; also, members of the public represent views from outside the research community."

Sorry, but I'm not reassured.  Fouchier's group wants to do this research because it's all they know how to do - and, I suspect, because they enjoy the publicity.  Despite their claims that the research is vital to our understanding of the flu, none of their past work, including their work on H5N1, has changed our ability to respond to a pandemic.  As flu expert Michael Osterholm said in a report by the Associated Press:

"H5N1 surveillance is as haphazard today as it was two years ago. Should we do the work if it's not actually going to make a difference?"

Precisely.  Fouchier and his colleagues can't do surveillance, nor do they work on vaccine development.  They have laboratories where they can engineer the flu virus to make new strains, so that's what they want to do. Two years after their controversial H5N1 experiments, they haven't contributed to any improvement in our ability to control a pandemic, nor have they shown how to develop a better flu vaccine.  The benefits of creating a deadly new H7N9 virus are marginal, at best.

What about the risk? As reported in the Daily Mail, Fouchier and his colleague Yoshihiro Kawaoka themselves said

"H7N9's pandemic risk would rise 'exponentially' if it gained the ability to spread more easily among people."

Really?  And from this they conclude that it's a good idea to engineer a virus that can do exactly that - spread more easily among people? Are we supposed to take this risk because of some theoretical benefit from a vague "better understanding" of how mutations in the virus change its pathogenicity?

Although Fouchier is in Rotterdam, the NIH funds part of his work through the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).  Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIAID, offered the reassurance that a special panel will review this H7N9 project, and

"If the risk is felt to be too high by this outside review, they will recommend it won't be done and we won't fund it."

Despite this additional oversight, I remain skeptical. These special panels tend to include other scientists who are very sympathetic with the work they're reviewing, as was demonstrated two years ago when the H5N1 work was published despite the grave concerns expressed by many outside the field.  I predict they will approve Fouchier and Kawaoka's experiments.

Here's a thought: put me on the panel: I've published multiple research papers on the influenza virus (including this paper in Nature and this paper on H5N1 avian flu), so I think it's fair to say I'm qualified.  But somehow I doubt they will do that.

Whatever happened to swine flu?

What happened to the flu pandemic?  In 2009, a new flu strain swept across the world. The new strain, called H1N1, emerged from pigs and jumped over to humans sometime in late 2008, and then swept through the human population starting in the spring of 2009.  Panic ensued.  Egypt responded by slaughtering all of its pigs, about 300,000.

Was the panic justified?  If so, where are all the victims?

I first wrote about this soon after the outbreak began, and we now know that hundreds of millions of people were infected, somewhere in the range 11% to 21% of the population.  That's an awful lot of sick people.  However, H1N1 turned out to be a very mild flu: many people experienced little more than a few days of sniffles, much like a common cold.  This surprising mildness of swine flu led to great confusion.  Conspiracy theorists claimed that the threat had been overblown, hyped by vaccine manufacturers and their government co-conspirators.  A wacky German lawmaker, Wolfgang Wodarg, even claimed that the swine flu vaccine caused cancer, a claim that was picked up and amplified by famed internet snake oil salesman, Joseph Mercola.

The swine flu now seems routine, just another human flu circulating among the population. As I wrote back in 2010, the seasonal flu vaccine now includes the H1N1 pandemic strain, so if you get your flu shot, you're protected.  But as this figure from the CDC shows, the current season has been dominated by H3N2. 

See the little tiny brown bits at the top of each bar?  Those are swine flu cases.  The swine flu has nearly vanished.

This is a big surprise, because in all three of the previous pandemics: 1918 ("Spanish" flu), 1957, and 1968, the new pandemic strain completely replaced the older strain.  That hasn't happened this time, and it looks like the old strain, H3N2, is winning.  That's rather unfortunate, because H3N2 is a much nastier flu than the swine flu.  And this year we had a big spike in deaths due to flu, all because of H3N2.

So no, the panic back in 2009 wasn't justified, but the warnings beforehand, about the possibilities of a pandemic, were legitimate.  All we knew in early 2009 was that a new pandemic strain had jumped from pigs to humans, and we didn't know for several months how bad (or mild) it would be.  The human species got lucky this time.

Can anyone say when the next pandemic will arrive?  Well, no.  Look at the past century: 4 pandemics, separated by 39 years, 11 years, and 41 years.  From that record it seems we should be safe for a while.  But until 2009, the pandemics had always pushed out the previous flu.  We're still living with the 1968 flu strain, and no one knows when a new flu will truly replace it.

Meanwhile, get your flu shot, because the flu mutates so fast that we need a new vaccine every year to keep ahead of it.  Work continues to try to develop a permanent flu vaccine - one that we will only have to take once in a lifetime.  If you like that idea, then keep supporting NIH, which is the biggest source of funding for flu research.

Oh right: we just cut NIH across the board because Congress couldn't get its act together.  I guess we may have to wait a bit longer for a better flu vaccine.

At the movies: popcorn and anti-vaccine fearmongering

The anti-vaccinationists have launched a new campaign this holiday season to spread cheer – oops, I mean fear – to moviegoers everywhere. Yes, the folks at SafeMinds and Age of Autism have produced an advertisement that they are trying to place in AMC theaters across the country. In fact, they almost succeeded, but quick action by skeptical science bloggers at SkepChick, Respectful Insolence, and their readerships convinced AMC to cancel the ad – for now.

The ad that SafeMinds is trying to run is intended to scare people away from getting their flu vaccine, just as flu season is beginning. The vaccine this year will protect you against both the new “swine” flu, called H1N1, and the previous flu strain, H3N2. Early data from the CDC makes it clear that both strains are still around, with H3N2 showing up somewhat more frequently so far this fall. The vaccine not only protects you, but also your family, your colleagues, and the many other people you might come into contact with each day while at work, shopping, or elsewhere.

Why try to scare people? Well, the people behind SafeMinds and Age of Autism believe that the preservative thimerosal, which is used in some but not all flu vaccines, causes autism. This theory has been thoroughly investigated over the past 10 years, and just as thoroughly discredited. In fact, it never had any positive evidence to support it in the first place, but it has been promoted aggressively by a journalist, David Kirby, who made his fortune off a book based on the thimerosal-autism hypothesis. (I’m not providing a link – Kirby has already made far too much money off this bogus claim, and I don’t want to give him the web traffic.)

Thimerosal was introduced into vaccines in the 1930s, and it is a very effective means to prevent the growth of bacteria without affecting the potency of the vaccine itself. In over 60 years and hundreds of millions of doses, it has proven to be quite benign. Nonetheless, it contains a form of mercury called ethylmercury, which anti-vaccinationists claim causes autism and other neurological disorders.

The claim that thimerosal causes autism was the central question of a large, multi-year Autism Omnibus trial, which ruled definitively last year that thimerosal does not cause autism. I wrote about that ruling at some length back in March, and I won’t repeat it here, except to quote again from the Special Master’s decision:

“The numerous medical studies concerning the issue of whether thimerosal causes autism, performed by medical scientists worldwide, have come down strongly against the petitioners’ contentions. Considering all of the evidence, I find that the petitioners have failed to demonstrate that thimerosal-containing vaccines can contribute to the causation of autism.”

The anti-vax crowd will not give up, unfortunately. Rather than spending their time and effort trying to find the true causes of autism, they continue to repeat claims that have already been shown false. For example, the SafeMinds website lists 5 “key points” that are just flat-out wrong. Here are the first two:

1. “The autism epidemic that began in the late 1980’s is likely due primarily to toxins adversely affecting fetus and infants during development.” Wrong, in at least two ways. First, there is no autism “epidemic.” The best evidence today indicates that the rising rates of autism are due to a combination of factors, primarily (a) rising rates of diagnosis due to increased awareness among physicians and patients and (b) a dramatically broader medical definition of autism that was introduced in the early 1990s.
2. “Mercury is likely a major contributor to this toxin-induced autism, whether the source of the mercury is from vaccines or environmental mercury exposure.” Wrong again. This is the claim that was so thoroughly refuted in the lengthy Autism Omnibus trial, with hundreds of pages of testimony from dozens of experts, and epidemiological data from literally hundreds of thousands of people.

But data doesn’t seem to have any effect on the anti-vax zealots at Age of Autism and SafeMinds.

Because AMC refused to run their ad, Age of Autism is telling its readers to stay away from AMC theaters this holiday season. I hope they do! Why? Because these unvaccinated individuals are a genuine threat to public health. Movie theaters, and the malls in which they are located, are an ideal place for infectious diseases to spread. Without vaccines, countless thousands of people would fall ill every holiday season after mingling with other shoppers, and some would likely die. My message to the unvaccinated crowd at SafeMinds is: stay away from the rest of us.

And I encourage everyone else to get your flu shot, get your kids vaccinated, and then go see a movie at an AMC theater. Meanwhile, you can also tell them at this link that you appreciate their taking a stand against misinformation and for the benefit of public health.