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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Tuesday, April 22, 2003 :::
In chapter 6 of the book Flu by Gina Kolata, she recounts the story of the legal liability difficulties that beset a program in 1976 to vaccinate a large portion of the population against swine flu. Insurance companies refused to insure the manufacturers for liability; part of the trouble was a 1974 lawsuit, Reyes v. Wyeth Laboratories, Inc., in which a child contracted polio after getting a vaccine.Neustadt and Fineberg, in their postmortem on the swine flu affair, tartly summed up what the Reyes case meant to vaccine manufacturers. The courts had ruled that Wyeth had failed to adequately warn of its vaccine's dangers. "Never mind that the company had included in cartons for shipment a printed form which did contain adequate warning. Never mind that experts had testified at trial that this particular case was not vaccine-related. Wyeth would pay (and did). The suffering was real and Wyeth had the only deep pocket available."
I may reread Volokh before getting too indiscriminate with the blockquotes, but Dr. Hans H. Neumann, who was director of preventive medicine at the New Haven Department of Health, explained the problem in a letter to The New York Times. He wrote that if Americans have flu shots in the numbers predicted, as many as 2,300 will have strokes and 7,000 will have heart attacks within two days of being immunized. "Why? Because that is the number statistically expected, flu shots or no flu shots," he wrote. "Yet can one expect a person who received a flu shot at noon and who that same night had a stroke not to associate somehow the two in his mind? Post hoc, ergo propter hoc," he added. Medical professionals in the program declined to vaccinate residents of one nursing home because they averaged a death every two days, and it was inevitable that one would be blamed on the immunization. Ultimately the vaccine was, in fact, linked to a syndrome that was poorly defined; while it's generally thought that the link was real, it is also clear that its observance was amplified by a tendency to diagnose it when the patient had recently received the vaccine, and to diagnose something else (or leave it undiagnosed) when the patient had not.
::: posted by dWj at 11:30 AM
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