Do Women Need Such Big Flu Shots?
According to Sabra L Klein and Phyllis Greenberger studies show that they do not. But as with much medical research, the normative is always based on the male (if the female is studied at all--I'm thinking about all we know about heart disease in men vs. the scant amount we know about women's heart disease because it never even occurred to researchers to study women for a long time).
Klein and Greenberger bring up some salient points in their NY Times Op-Ed when they suggest that the vaccine might be more available to vulnerable populations in poor countries if we weren't dosing women with more vaccine than they need! That and the medical fact that women have a stronger antibody response to the vaccines and when given a lower dose do not have as many side effects. Seems like an all-around good thing, huh!
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Seems that the problem is that while women in general might need less, it is not yet clear how much less or how many other factors might be at play so they've simply settled for their 95/99% confidence interval. Its not an unreasonable position to side with caution in the absence of complete information.
if the female is studied at all
Women are typically less likely to be studied because it is and has been considered more unethical to test on women, particularly women who might become pregnant.
I'm thinking about all we know about heart disease in men vs. the scant amount we know about women's heart disease because it never even occurred to researchers to study women for a long time
Because if you look at comparative mortality rates, particularly at what they were twenty years ago when there were not significant funds being devoted to researching heart disease in women. The odds of a woman dying of heart disease would only pick up until around their 60s, when the same probability of death would be found in men when they were in their 40s. By contrast for the same age bracket in women breast cancer was a larger concern. Hence the comparative funding rates, research was devoted first to what killed the most people when they were younger before devoting attention to what killed people when they were older.
Aside from the pregnant and trying, why would it be more unethical to test on women? I had always assumed it was some combination of drug companies trying to keep costs low (the less testing the better) and women being socialized to be more cautious (less likely to volunteer for studies).
My understanding of it is that often being pregnant, trying to become pregnant or using other medications (including hormonal birth control) can disqualify you from a lot of these studies because they don't want side effects from the hormonal birth control to complicate the study. There are a lot of women on hormonal birth control, pregnant or trying to become pregnant, so this makes it more difficult to recruit women for the studies.