Now it’s the flu jab

Things have been quiet when it's come to the HPV jab for the past few days, but fear not: the Mail has found a new target - the regular, safe, hardly-ever-causes-any-problems flu jab which thousands of its readers will be having over the next few weeks (or may have already had). What better time, then, to scare the shit out of them?

The headline

Normal flu jabs 'double the risk of catching swine bug'

might lead you to think there's some rock-solid science behind this, but you know better than that by now, I'm sure:

The Canadian study – led by Dr Danuta Skowronski of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and Dr Gaston De Serres of Laval University, Quebec – has not yet been published in a medical journal but was reported in GP newspaper.

And besides

Many of these people [having the seasonal flu jab] will also be in line for priority vaccination against swine flu, due to start by the end of the month, along with NHS frontline staff.

And there are comments - well, see for yourself. I approach Daily Mail comments with the weary inevitability you might have when trying to round up a wounded animal - you know it's going to bite you, it's just a question of when. How much can we trust the Mail about its stories, though? Perhaps some evidence is given by this story, which is given more prominence on their website front page than the jabs one:

Kellogg's will use laser to burn logo on to individual corn flakes to stamp out fakes

Come again?

According to the advertising slogan, if you see Kellogg's on the box then you know it's Kellogg's in the box.
But now the company has become so concerned about similarly packaged supermarket cereals, it has developed a laser to burn its logo on to individual Corn Flakes.

I know newspapers have to make money - that's why they exist, and jolly good luck to them in doing so.* But writing some shit like this up as if it's real? What the fuck good does that do anyone? Set next to real news stories, crapola like this just cheapens the entire news output. If they care this little about how the cornflakes story makes them look, what does that say about the vaccination story? Or any others?

*At least, I sincerely hope they got paid to put this in. If not, it's bewildering.

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