LETTER: Vaccination details can be deceiving

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Knowing how many people who died from influenza with or without flu vaccinations is meaningless (Leader, July 5 issue) without knowing how many people did and did not receive vaccinations.

To demonstrate in the simplest mathematical way, if 118 people were not vaccinated and 59 of them died, and 238 people were vaccinated and 119 of them died, the chance of dying with or without a vaccination is 50 percent – exactly equal for the population being considered in the calculation.

And of course, in the real world, everything else isn’t equal – flu shots are recommended for the elderly and individuals with certain medical conditions, both of which likely mean that the population of those taking flu shots in any year would have a higher expected mortality than the population of those not taking flu shots.

DAVID GIVEN

Port Townsend