And more Dots………

Policy vs Evidence for Influenza Vaccines

In 2006, emerging from a decade of Cochrane reviews of influenza vaccines, I was still trying to work out why these interventions were being pushed so hard despite clear evidence that their effects were, at best, slight. The evidence we had assembled came from randomised controlled trials, and it was consistent across age groups. However, the age group performing slightly better (as expected) were healthy adults. 

Then I got a phone call from a CDC fella who offered me a grant for 100k USD to look into a vaccine, which he said would be very important. It was so important that I had forgotten which one it was (I took notes and had to look them up to remind me occasionally). 

It was an apparent attempt at despistage, as the French would call it. It was April, and staring at the Roman countryside from my window, I conceived a simple idea. Now that we had a complete suite of Cochrane reviews, how did the policy stack up against good quality evidence? 

I started by asking myself which data sh…