Specifically, an example of a respected journal and/or editor actually funded by a pharmaceutical company. Certainly there are journals out there where you can publish anything you want, but those niche journals have names like (I'm making this one up) Journal of the Alaskan Surgeons Society and an impact factor of zero.
I have 0 idea of what journals are respected or not in medical science, and there are LOTS of journals. Moreover, the one you cited before is the 2nd abstract I have read in my life about non-psychiatry non-neurology medical science, so it is possible that only mental health papers do bullshit in their math. But I have been to the doctor many many times and heard ridiculous statistical interpretations.
The complaint that peer review is biased/flawed generally comes from people who deliberately misunderstand science, e.g., anti-vaxxers, global warming deniers, conspiracy theorists. It eventually ends up repeated by people who didn't check their sources properly when something was posted to their Facebook wall.
Well, I do not belong in any of the groups you mention in that paragraph, including the group "people with facebook". I certainly do not think I misunderstand science, and if I do, I am certainly not doing it on purpose. Specifically, I did not say peer review IS biased or flawed. Well, I may say it is biased, because it is. It is biased towards the current scientific consensus in the discipline of what is interesting or relevant, which is something entirely subjective. And it is biased towards the current scientific consensus of what is "true" which hopefully approaches truth, but it is not equivalent to it. Scientific consensus once disbelieved the existence of germs and the most respected doctors suggested bleeding people to cure them, so... I am pretty sure that whatever we are doing today is going to be deemed as barbaric and/or stupid in some time, a couple of centuries at best.
That is not to say we should not do it. I certainly support scientific research. I do use medicine and trust the research behind it. And I mostly disregard 95% of "alternative medicine" due to being not scientific (there is some scientific alternative medicine, but I will digress a lot if I go into that).
OK, actual question: Have you experienced influenza? Or have you merely experienced what people call "the flu" but is really just a bad head cold? The course of influenza is 4-7 days, assuming no secondary pneumonia infection. The symptoms are a lot more than just a severe cold, and include moderate muscle pain, severe lethargy, difficulty swallowing, etc.
I did have all of those symptoms but the difficult swallowing simultaneously, and had to remain in bed for 3 days and to remain in the house for 7. It was the week before graduating, though, so not the best case study for a general discussion. It is not like that every time nor every year, though. Mostly, I am in decent shape to go out and work (in my desk-job) after only 2 days of bed time. And the people I know have usually even better health in this regard.
"Agony" is perhaps overstatement, depending on what you feel is agonizing. Two years ago I fucked up...
I am really sorry about that. The only time there were a lot of reported cases of several influenza here was a couple of years ago with the H1N1 thing. And the regular vaccine did not work on that, so I did not consider those when thinking about whether the vaccine is / would have been a good idea. Are you certain that the strain you got would have been prevented by the vaccine? Is there a significant amount of those cases (i.e., strong flu's that the vaccine available at the time would have prevented)?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15694506
Five minutes on Google. Alas, without academic access you can generally only see abstracts.
I read the abstract, but it seems to me to be saying the opposite: vaccinating only ~25% of the children helped immunize the adults to some extent. That seems completely within reason even without a paper to support it. My point is whether immunizing risk groups is enough, that is, whether immunizing risk groups only vs immunizing everyone has a significant difference in the numbers.
*I say somewhat healthy; I am epileptic and have persistent depressive disorder, both medicated.
Everyone has something. I hope you are one of the many people that have the mild epilepsy variants and that it is the curable kind.
BTW, are you a medical researcher of some kind? I was under the impression you were a mathematician.