You probably already heard Rush Limbaugh telling Kathleen Sebelius to shove her swine flu shot. Well, here's a similar perspective (but with more detail and more finesse) from the left. Click through the link to read the full article. I don't want to steal these writers' stuff, so I'm only including a sample:

 

Health November 2009 Atlantic Whether this season’s swine flu turns
out to be deadly or mild, most experts agree that it’s only a matter
of time before we’re hit by a truly devastating flu pandemic—one that
might kill more people worldwide than have died of the plague and aids
combined. In the U.S., the main lines of defense are
pharmaceutical—vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread of flu
and prevent people from dying from it. Yet now some flu experts are
challenging the medical orthodoxy and arguing that for those most in
need of protection, flu shots and antiviral drugs may provide little
to none. So where does that leave us if a bad pandemic strikes?
by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer

Does the Vaccine Matter?

Drive too fast along Red Lion Road, beside Philadelphia’s Northeast
Airport, and you will miss the low-rise cement building where the
biotech company MedImmune has been quietly pumping out swine flu
vaccine at about a million doses a week. Through the summer and fall,
workers wearing protective gear that covered them from head to toe
brewed up batches of live, genetically modified flu virus. Robots then
injected tiny doses of virus-laden fluid into glass vials, which were
mounted into nasal spritzers, labeled, and readied for shipment at the
direction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in
Atlanta, which is helping to coordinate the nation’s
pandemic-preparedness plan. In the most ambitious vaccination program
the nation has mounted since the anti-polio campaign in the 1950s, the
federal government has commissioned MedImmune and four other companies
to produce enough vaccine to cover the entire U.S. population.

 

Vaccination is central to the government’s plan for preventing deaths
from swine flu. The CDC has recommended that some 159 million adults
and children receive either a swine flu shot or a dose of MedImmune’s
nasal vaccine this year. Shots are offered in doctors’ offices,
hospitals, airports, pharmacies, schools, polling places, shopping
malls, and big-box stores like Wal-Mart. In August, New York state
required all health-care workers to get both seasonal and swine flu
shots. To further protect the populace, the federal government has
spent upwards of $3billion stockpiling millions of doses of antiviral
drugs like Tamiflu—which are being used both to prevent swine flu and
to treat those who fall ill.

But what if everything we think we know about fighting influenza is
wrong? What if flu vaccines do not protect people from
dying—particularly the elderly, who account for 90 percent of deaths
from seasonal flu? And what if the expensive antiviral drugs that the
government has stockpiled over the past few years also have little, if
any, power to reduce the number of people who die or are hospitalized?
The U.S. government—with the support of leaders in the public-health
and medical communities—has put its faith in the power of vaccines and
antiviral drugs to limit the spread and lethality of swine flu. Other
plans to contain the pandemic seem anemic by comparison. Yet some top
flu researchers are deeply skeptical of both flu vaccines and
antivirals. Like the engineers who warned for years about the levees
of New Orleans, these experts caution that our defenses may be flawed,
and quite possibly useless against a truly lethal flu. And that unless
we are willing to ask fundamental questions about the science behind
flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, we could find ourselves, in a bad
epidemic, as helpless as the citizens of New Orleans during Hurricane
Katrina.

 

...

 

We think we have the flu anytime we fall ill with an
ailment that brings on headache, malaise, fever, coughing, sneezing,
and that achy feeling as if we’ve been sleeping on a bed of rocks, but
researchers have found that at most half, and perhaps as few as 7 or 8
percent, of such cases are actually caused by an influenza virus in
any given year. More than 200 known viruses and other pathogens can
cause the suite of symptoms known as “influenza-like illness”;
respiratory syncytial virus, bocavirus, coronavirus, and rhinovirus
are just a few of the bugs that can make a person feel rotten. And
depending on the season, in up to two-thirds of the cases of flu-like
illness, no cause at all can be found.

 

...

 

But while vaccines for, say, whooping cough and polio clearly and
dramatically reduced death rates from those diseases, the impact of
flu vaccine has been harder to determine. Flu comes and goes with the
seasons, and often it does not kill people directly, but rather
contributes to death by making the body more susceptible to secondary
infections like pneumonia or bronchitis. For this reason, researchers
studying the impact of flu vaccination typically look at deaths from
all causes during flu season, and compare the vaccinated and
unvaccinated populations.

Such comparisons have shown a dramatic difference in mortality between
these two groups: study after study has found that people who get a
flu shot in the fall are about half as likely to die that winter—from
any cause—as people who do not. Get your flu shot each year, the
literature suggests, and you will dramatically reduce your chance of
dying during flu season.

Yet in the view of several vaccine skeptics, this claim is suspicious
on its face. Influenza causes only a small minority of all deaths in
the U.S., even among senior citizens, and even after adding in the
deaths to which flu might have contributed indirectly. When
researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases included all deaths from illnesses that flu aggravates, like
lung disease or chronic heart failure, they found that flu accounts
for, at most, 10 percent of winter deaths among the elderly. So how
could flu vaccine possibly reduce total deaths by half? Tom Jefferson,
a physician based in Rome and the head of the Vaccines Field at the
Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected international network of
researchers who appraise medical evidence, says: “For a vaccine to
reduce mortality by 50 percent and up to 90 percent in some studies
means it has to prevent deaths not just from influenza, but also from
falls, fires, heart disease, strokes, and car accidents. That’s not a
vaccine, that’s a miracle.”

 

...

 

The estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction is based on “cohort
studies,” which compare death rates in large groups, or cohorts, of
people who choose to be vaccinated, against death rates in groups who
don’t. But people who choose to be vaccinated may differ in many
important respects from people who go unvaccinated—and those
differences can influence the chance of death during flu season.
Education, lifestyle, income, and many other “confounding” factors can
come into play, and as a result, cohort studies are notoriously prone
to bias.

 

...

 

When Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group
Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to
colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of 50
percent mortality reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the
response she got sounded more like doctrine than science. “People told
me, ‘No good can come of [asking] this,’” she says. “‘Potentially a
lot of bad could happen’ for me professionally by raising any
criticism that might dissuade people from getting vaccinated, because
of course, ‘We know that vaccine works.’ This was the prevailing
wisdom.”

 

...

 

Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline
risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was
approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending
support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get
the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact,
the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other
researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the
vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all...