We Cannot Trust the CDC Estimates of Flu Vaccine Effectiveness

Source: Brownstone Institute
by Eyal Shahar

“Each year the CDC publishes an estimate of the effectiveness of the flu vaccine in the previous flu season. Recently, the NIH director criticized the test-negative design from which the estimates are derived. He was right. The basic premise of the design is a two-edged sword: on the one hand, restricting the sample to people who sought medical care might reduce confounding by healthcare-seeking behavior; on the other hand, that restriction might add another type of bias — colliding bias — which is not as widely appreciated. The net bias remains unknown.” (10/01/26)

https://brownstone.org/articles/we-cannot-trust-the-cdc-estimates-of-flu-vaccine-effectiveness/