I'd like to think the flu vaccine researchers are a little better than the pitcher/batter scenario, but I can accept that it is a moving target so there's no guarantee that the formulation will hit the bull's eye. Either way, if someone genuinely feels flu vaccine is detrimental to them, they can always decline. I have heard many doubts about effectiveness, but I haven't heard very many allegations of flu vaccine actually causing harm. It was always my impression that it was either effective or ineffective, but no detriment or downside as such.
I will say this, I used to work in hospital administration and every employee and doctor on staff got flu vaccine. So if it were detrimental, or some type of scam, our doctors weren't in on it because they were lined up with everyone else to receive it.
Thank you for the link. I'll have to listen to the Science Friday segment. The thing that comes to mind is that there is always a market for apocalyptic predictions. I remember plenty of them when SARS broke, and also when the H1N1 outbreak happened. Somehow the world kept turning.
There are plenty of movies about virus pandemics, bio terrorism and the like. It's always suspicious to me when anyone talks with certainty like "zero potential for a vaccine in the remote future". How could anyone credibly say such a thing?
Edwin