It’s that time of year again when children are getting ready to go back to school. Of course, schools are breeding grounds for viral infections. So I’m sure we’ll soon hear from the talking heads at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). They’ll start to feverishly urge parents to make sure their children get the influenza vaccine to protect against this year’s strain of the virus.
But is the science really there?
At a recent congressional hearing, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) asked a CDC science bureaucrat, “Has the CDC ever done a study comparing vaccinated children with unvaccinated children yet?”
The astounding answer came: “We have never studied vaccinated versus unvaccinated.”
Now here’s the kicker…
The CDC would definitely castigate any natural approach to flu prevention that wasn’t backed up by evidence from clinical trials. (They widely dismiss natural approaches even when they’re backed up by clinical trials!)
Meanwhile, they spend billions on vaccine research and development. (Compare that amount to the puny millions allotted to research on all natural approaches.) Yet they haven’t done the most basic of all scientific studies before foisting this dangerous, ineffective vaccine on the public–including our children.
The CDC claims conducting a study comparing vaccinated children to non-vaccinated children is “unethical.” So–the U.S. government steadfastly refuses to perform this kind of true comparative study. Apparently, they assume depriving anyone of the dangerous, ineffective, and unproven influenza vaccine is unthinkable. After all, they are from the government. And they are here to help us.
Public health bureaucrats want us to believe the flu vaccine “works” only because it causes the body to develop antibodies to the flu virus. Unfortunately, it doesn’t reduce the likelihood of actually contracting the viral infection, which is the ultimate purpose of any vaccine.
In 2012, scientists in Hong Kong did conduct a study that compared children who got the flu vaccine to those who didn’t. This study is the only one I’ve heard about in recent years where researchers compared an actual placebo to the flu vaccine.
Researchers divided the children into two groups. The first group received the trivalent flu vaccine. (In other words, the vaccine contained three strains of influenza circulating that season.) The second group received a salt solution, a genuinely inactive treatment, as the placebo.
Then, they followed the children for about nine months. Overall, the vaccinated group didn’t get the flu any less than the non-vaccinated group. In fact, they got it more!
Astoundingly, 116 children in the vaccinated group caught the flu. But only 88 children in the placebo group got it. In other words, nearly 25 percent more children who received the vaccine got the flu compared to children who didn’t get the vaccine.
Plus, the children who got the flu vaccine ended up contracting almost four times as many respiratory infections overall as the children who didn’t get the vaccine. To be more specific, the vaccinated group experienced 230 cases of rhinovirus (common cold). But the non-vaccinated placebo group experienced only 59 cases.
Unfortunately, when it comes to politically correct government programs, the actual results are never enough.
The researchers tried to cover their own rumps by claiming the vaccine somehow did lower the risk of influenza infection based on “serologic” evidence. What does that mealy-mouthed statement really mean?
Serologic evidence just means the vaccinated children had more antibodies in their blood. Therefore, we should somehow assume the vaccinated children had more immunity to prevent infection with the flu.
But it didn’t really work that way.
So-called “serologic immunity” has no impact on actually preventing the flu, as the Hong Kong studies showed. Yet, amazingly, the presence of “serologic immunity” is taken as the standard measure of success in all the studies that don’t actually observe a proper clinical trial outcome. In other words, the standard measure for vaccines is meaningless when it comes to actual infection! Who comes up with these standards anyway? Sounds like a typical government standard to me.
But the story of the ineffective flu vaccine gets even worse. The vaccinated children with all those standard antibodies actually came down with 58 cases of H1N1 pandemic swine flu compared to zero in the unvaccinated group. Plus, the vaccinated group acquired 168 cases of the Coxsackie/Echovirus compared to zero in the unvaccinated.
Of course, children typically do get more than one virus during the course of the colds and flu season. But the vaccinated children clearly got many times more.
Still, the CDC says (with a straight face) that you and your children should get this vaccine each and every year. It astounds me.
Hong Kong was a good place to find some real science, since many experts think the new strain of influenza that emerges each year arises from a complex interaction among poultry, swine, and people that occurs in Guangdong (Canton) Province, China.
Hong Kong was originally part of Canton, before the British split it off the mainland as a crown colony on a 99-year lease. More recently, Hong Kong was returned to China as an autonomous city. It’s actually a series of islands off the Kowloon peninsula, famous for its mode of water transportation called “junks.”
Ironically, they did a real study on the flu vaccine in Hong Kong. But the “junk science” comes from the standards employed in the U.S., by the CDC.
Source:
“Increased Risk of Noninfluenza Respiratory Virus Infections Associated With Receipt of Inactivated Influenza Vaccine,” Clinical Infectious Disease, 2012; 54(12):1778-1783