In their fake operating rooms, TV doctors are fond of saying, “Don’t just stand there, do something.” But in reality, sometimes it is better to just stand there and do nothing. Especially when it comes to the flu. In fact, a new editorial published in the influential Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) urges physicians “rethink” the flu vaccine. And to set aside the government’s “group think” and do their own homework.
I often write about the influenza virus. It causes much less harm each year than most people realize. And it goes away each year on its own, even without the flu vaccine, thanks to a very low contagion factor. Plus, the vaccine itself causes much more harm than good…as I’ll explain in a moment. Yet the CDC continues to drone on about giving the vaccine to every man, woman, and child over six months of age.
I recently declined the flu vaccine at my doctor’s office. In fact, I had to decline it three or four times. They simply couldn’t understand my reasoning. Clearly, as the JAMA editorial suggests, primary care physicians, and their new class of “physician assistants,” just don’t seem to know the facts about the flu.
But this is what they will discover, if they ever do start to conduct their homework…
The CDC portrays the annual influenza outbreak as a pandemic. As inevitable as death and taxes. Yet, in reality, the majority of Americans don’t even get the flu in any given year. The virus has a very low contagion factor. So, on average, a person with influenza will infect just one other person. And there’s a good chance he or she will never infect anybody.
And the vaccine does very little to decrease the flu’s transmission rate. In fact, a recent systematic review found that we must vaccinate up to 100 people to prevent the virus in just one other person! Based on this evidence, influenza doesn’t even qualify to be classified as a “vaccine-preventable disease.”
Yet the CDC still tries to guilt you into getting the vaccine. Even if you are healthy and don’t often get sick, they claim your vaccination will protect the vulnerable population of older adults against the flu. Some workplaces even require employees to get the vaccine using coercive measures.
Yet, no evidence suggests that vaccinating healthy adults reduces the spread of influenza to older people. Or that it reduces complications for them. The statistics the CDC uses to support vaccination of health care workers to protect the elderly defy logic. The vaccine appears to reduce overall mortality but not death from influenza!
In addition, as I reported last winter, most research over the last 50 years shows the vaccine is very ineffective for older adults. They still get sick even if they get the vaccine.
And this little-known fact may help explain why….
Very often, people come down with something they think is the flu. But it’s something else. Some other kind of “viral agent.” What most people call the “flu” actually has hundreds of known and unknown causes.
In fact, a recent review of vaccination trials found that the actual influenza virus caused just 7 percent of the reported cases of the “flu.” The other 93 percent of cases were caused by something else entirely! Even the difficult and stubborn “Fibromyalgia-Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.”
Unfortunately, the CDC’s heavy-handed “education” leads people to think that the influenza virus is the culprit every time they feel ill with headache, fever, and cough. But that’s simply not the case.
And this fact may partly explain why winter mortality rates have not changed since the vaccine was introduced. The CDC claims a “healthy user” effect confounds their statistics. In other words, healthy people are the most common users of the vaccine. And the CDC says if they could just get more sick people to receive the vaccine, the statistics would look better.
Sounds like backwards logic to me. But let’s put aside the effectiveness argument for the moment. And consider some of the vaccine’s known dangers.
Over the years, doctors, hospitals, and health agencies in this country have been very negligent in reporting the vaccine’s safety problems. And the CDC tolerates this on-going negligence.
In 1976, the swine flu vaccine caused 500 cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome and 25 deaths. Today, the CDC passes this disaster off as “ancient history.” But the problems are far from over. You see, vaccines are biologics. They’re notoriously messy to prepare and preserve, compared to drugs or supplements. So problems are bound to continue.
In 2009, Australia stopped giving the flu vaccine to children under five following a surge in febrile convulsions in children who received it. Also in 2009, Finland and Sweden saw an epidemic of narcolepsy among adolescents who received the vaccine. Of course, these events received scant attention from the U.S. media.
I also worry about what all this vaccinating does to our immune systems. You have to figure that getting a complex vaccine year after year for a non-threatening virus wreaks havoc on your body’s natural defenses.
And the data seems to support this theory…
In Canada, people who received the 2008 flu vaccine had a 10 times greater risk of acquiring the notorious H1N1 virus the following year. Perhaps these annual vaccinations suppress the immune system. And prevent people from developing natural immunity, as we have seen with many other viral pandemics.
The CDC says giving an unreliable vaccine is still better than standing by and doing nothing. But I disagree. Sometimes, the best medicine is to do nothing at all.
Bottom line?
You don’t need the flu vaccine. You can prevent and even manage the illness without vaccination. Just go to the top right sight of this page and type “flu” into the search box. You’ll find 20 articles in my archives for effective ways to combat the flu without resorting to vaccinations.
Sources:
1. “Influenza Vaccines : Time for a Rethink,” JAMA Intern Med. 2013;173(11):1014-1016
2. “Vaccines for preventing influenza in health adults,” Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2010;(7):CD001269
3. “Mistaken Identity: seasonal influenza vs. influenza-like illness,” BMJ Clinical Evidence (www.clinicalevidence.bmj.com), October 2009