Talk:1977 Russian flu

Estimate of the number of deaths

The estimate of the number of deaths presented in the article (700 000) does not seem reliable. Ref 8 is a Covid paper citing Ref 7; Ref 9 is a now unavailable news article which presented a number without justification. Ref 7 proposes the value in a table (Table 1), but without any justification. There does not seem to be scientific articles backing this estimate, which is at odds with the notion that this flu was mild ("atypically mild for a new epidemic strain" in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/). TenaciousTanuki (talk) 18:51, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

The death figure estimate was published in a peer-reviewed medical journal Medical Microbiology and Immunology, and has been cited by other papers. These are reliable sources WP:RS. You are entitled to have your opinion or educated suspicion, but please do not publish your original research or original opinions WP:NOR in Wikipedia. If you have questions regarding the methodology of the paper, I suggest you should contact the authors of the paper directly or the medical journal, but not here in Wikipedia, which is not a forum WP:FORUM or a research journal WP:NOTGUIDE. Thank you. --Kutu126b (talk) 05:37, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

OK thanks for your input. Would it be OK to correct the sentence to remove the word estimate (which implies calculations; the original source just gives a number without justifying it)?

And would it be OK to add a sentence to point out that the number is at odds with the rest of the paragraph (700000 deaths is much more than regular flu at the time)? TenaciousTanuki (talk) 07:55, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

For the word "estimate", it is actually taken from the paper [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00430-009-0118-5/tables/1], which states "Deaths (estimated)". I think the paper must have assumed certain methodology for the estimate, and if you are interested I'd still suggest you contact the authors. Otherwise, you will need to find other reliable sources (by Wikipedia standard) which express similar suspicion as yours, and then we can cite those sources in this article, in addition to the above paper. In any case, here in Wikipedia we cannot "correct" or "point out" that some quoted number from a paper is wrong just because we think it's wrong -- this will be counted as original research WP:NOR.. Kutu126b (talk) 00:31, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Secondary / Tertiary sources

Can we have secondary or tertiary sources, especially for the claim that it is a vaccine challenge gone wrong ? J mareeswaran (talk) 05:56, 12 January 2024 (UTC)