Rand Paul has said a lot of crazy things in his short life, but we recently had one of the craziest highlighted when we were shown a clip from an interview conducted in 2009, by Alex Jones' Infowars crew. In the clip Randian spouts off about Martial Law and Vaccines, noting that "Back in the 70's, more people died from the flu vaccine than died from the flu".
Setting aside the total inanity of suggesting that our understanding of Influenza vaccination hasn't progressed significantly since the 1970s. Setting aside the total inanity of trying to say the 1970s H1N1 outbreak and the 2008 H1N1 were likely to be comparable (in the 1970s outbreak the CDC had 1 confirmed case when they went into "potential pandemic" mode and issued a call for 48 million Americans to be inoculated; by the time Rand was giving this interview to Jones, there had already been over 10,000 confirmed cases of H1N1 in the U.S. and several deaths). Setting all of that aside, I simply want to focus on one salient point.
Step under the orange squiggly virus at your own risk.
Let's ignore the basic cra-cra in "Dr." Paul's comment. Let's just look at it in simple statistical analysis.
We give vaccines in order to preclude people from contracting a potentially horrible disease.
There are virtually no vaccines that are 100% effective.
By the 1970s, there were very few vaccines considered 100% safe.
If you recognize all of those statements as "true"; it is still a fairly simple proposition to show that "Dr." Rand Paul DOES NOT UNDERSTAND SCIENCE at all.
Just using simple numbers for simplicity sake:
IF you had a population of 10,000 people, and
IF 500 (5%) of that population could not be vaccinated for medical reasons, and
IF the remaining 9,500 individuals all received the vaccine
THEN
You could reasonably presume that if the vaccine was 90% (or more) effective, you would have very few cases of people contracting the disease that they were vaccinated against.
AND
You could reasonably presume that a small percentage might develop complications due to
1. Previously undiagnosed health conditions
2. Random chance (e.g. "background noise" or the number of people who DIE or develop a disorder, for no apparent reason, EVERY SINGLE DAY IN AMERICA.
In 1976, there was one diagnosed case (which resulted in Death) in the Fort Dix, NJ area when the Government issued a call for large scale immunization. 48 million individuals received the vaccine in the United States. There were more cases in the Fort Dix area, and another variant of the H1N1 strain persisted in other parts of the country for a few months, but there were no additional fatalities due to the flu. There were 25 deaths attributed to complications as a result of receiving the vaccine.
In 1918, a similar strain of influenza killed 50 million people worldwide.
I'm sorry that 25 people died, possibly as a result of receiving the vaccine, but, I don't see how that makes it too great a risk to be inoculated. The whole point of a large scale immunization plan is to protect the greatest number of a vulnerable population. I hate to be "cold", but, in a perfect scenario you would hope for the outcome that we saw in 1976. An "outbreak" of H1N1 could kill tens of thousands or more. If mass immunization cuts that number to "one" but 25 end up dying from complications with the vaccine, WE STILL SAVED THOUSANDS OF LIVES that would otherwise have perished.
This should not be difficult to understand.