Pregnant nurse: I was fired for refusing flu vaccine

[Ms. Toad]

25. Some nice knee-jerkery going on in this thread.

Here are some facts:

• The hospital she works at allows nurses who do not vaccinate for religious reasons the option of wearing masks during flu season. She offered to do the same, and was rejected because her reason was medical rather than religious.
  
  
• Her obstetrician and primary care doctor supported her decision, based on their assessment of her specific medical circumstances.
  
  
• She is correct about the state of research about the impact of vaccination on miscarriage. It is insufficient - and there are peer reviewed studies which support both sides (and studies which acknowledge design problems with existing studies which bias some of the existing studies against even being able to answer the question).
  
  

  "There was some evidence of an increased HR for preterm delivery following pH1N1-influenza vaccine exposure; however the decrease in gestational age on average was approximately three days." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24016809
  
  "Vaccination was associated with an increased adverse composite outcome in pregnant women without identified co-morbidity but not those with co-morbidities." (The co-morbidities included prior preterm births.) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23406444
  
  "The unadjusted fetal-loss report rates for the three consecutive influenza seasons beginning 2008/2009 were 6.8 (95% CI: 0.1-13.1), 77.8 (95% CI: 66.3-89.4), and 12.6 (95% CI: 7.2-18.0) cases per million pregnant women vaccinated, respectively. The observed reporting bias was too low to explain the magnitude increase in fetal-demise reporting rates in the VAERS database relative to the reported annual trends. Thus, a synergistic fetal toxicity likely resulted from the administration of both the pandemic (A-H1N1) and seasonal influenza vaccines during the 2009/2010 season." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23023030
  
  And - because of how the studies have been conducted and when miscarriages occur, they are likely to be biased against being able to reveal a link because both the vaccination and the risk period during the pregnancy must be captured in the study window, and many women are recruited after one or both - which needs to be taken into account in the design of future studies. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22674821

  
  


Note: I am not claiming that the above studies are all that is out there. There are also studies which suggest there is no increase in risk. My point is that many in this thread (as is unfortunately typical in any discussion on vaccination both on DU and in real life) jumped to the immediate conclusion that her decision was based on "internet nutjobbery," or that she was "scarily uninformed." "a menace to herself, her baby," or incompetent.

These conversations would be a lot more productive if people would take the time to read the underlying article (which - in this case provided the first two facts above - including that the hospital does not automatically fire nurses merely for refusing a vaccination, and that two medical doctors who know her personally and are well versed in her particular health history support her decision) and would do a little research to see if there are valid concerns out there (or - as in this case - not enough research to address the narrow concerns raised - in this case whether the influenza vaccine increases the risk of miscarriage in the population of women with a history of miscarriage).