The app for independent voices
Up First podcast from NPR reports about how we are getting clobbered with influenza A right now. >3,000 deaths already, on pace with last season’s 45,000 deaths. They report that only 40% of US adults got a flu shot this year. Flu shots cut severity and deaths.
A “CDC” spokesperson told NPR: “vaccines are a personal choice and that people should speak to their health care providers about the risks and benefits.”
That’s a harmful, misleading, anti-science, blanket policy. Here’s why.
The core problem: “Talk to your doctor” cowardly privatizes what is fundamentally a population decision
When CDC/federal messaging defaults to “talk to your doctor” as the primary directive for vaccines (or other interventions that previously had clear expert defaults), it shifts a public-health optimization problem into millions of fragmented, time-compressed, variably informed micro-decisions. That move predictably increases variance, inequity, and vulnerability to motivated reasoning—exactly the conditions in which crappy information thrives. And there are certainly crappy doctors, too.
This does not mean clinician–patient discussion is bad. It means “talk to your doctor” is a poor substitute for clear institutional recommendations. In practice this fake freedom of guidance becomes an escape hatch from accountability and a knee bent to antivax ideology.
Here was my take on this year’s flu season prep, written before the predictable wave hit. As one small conversation with one random primary care MD, it would be nice if it complemented a unified public health campaign from a still functional CDC:
And the NPR report:
