From the Boston Globe (boldface mine):
Roughly 100 children die in an average flu season. One exception was the swine flu pandemic of 2009-2010, when 348 children died.
The CDC recommends that all children ages 6 months and older be vaccinated against flu each season, though only about half get a flu shot or nasal spray.
All but four of the children who died were old enough to be vaccinated, but 90 percent of them did not get vaccinated, CDC officials said.
This year’s vaccine was considered effective in children, though it didn’t work very well in older people. And the dominant flu strain early in the season was one that tends to cause more severe illness.
If this doesn’t convince people to get vaccinated, I don’t know what will. Because someone infected these children, and the odds of that happening decrease when more people are vaccinated.
mikethemadbiologist
Love your blog – not wild about WP.com…I set something up on it long ago and I can’t get rid of it!
We are totally dysfunctional as a society. There is an anti-intellectual group who are now running a big part of the show now in Washington. They were behind that ludicrous nonsense regrading autism and vaccines. In spite of ALL the research done to close the door on this issue there are still some crazies who think its some sort of conspiracy. These are the same people that think the planet is 6000 years old. As Lewis Black said, these are people who think the Flintstones is a documentary.