I have to tell you, I am having an absolute ball with the EmpowerEd membership program (and thankfully, the members seem to enjoying it too ;-))! Answering members’ health and nutrition-related questions in the monthly Ask Robyn call, and researching interesting topics to produce Deep Dive webinars that inform members about how to live healthier and happier lives, really gets my Inner Nerd revved up :).
In our last Ask Robyn call, a member asked for advice on how to build a strong immune system to withstand the coming cold and flu season. I covered the major elements of diet (including specific foods with immune-enhancing activities), exercise and sleep, which you can learn about by joining the EmpowerEd membership program and watching the video recording. I also have a written summary of advice and links to the scientific articles from which that advice is drawn.
Where does vaccination fit in? The most independent and credible medical research group in the world, the Cochrane Collaboration, has concluded that the seasonal influenza vaccine is useless for the vast majority of people.
In a previous article, I summarised several Cochrane Reviews on flu vaccination in different populations: healthy children, healthy adults, elderly people and healthcare workers who work with the elderly. Their conclusions were equally bleak for each population group: the vaccine performs no better than placebo (and in some cases, worse than placebo) at preventing the flu, does not make the flu any less severe if you get it, does not prevent serious complications such as pneumonia, does not decrease absenteeism at work or school, and is associated with the risk of serious harms which are probably massively underreported.
Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist trained at the world-famous London School of Tropical Hygiene, and the head of the Vaccine Field Group at the Cochrane Database Collaboration. He and his team minutely examined hundreds of studies on flu vaccination in order to draw their conclusions. The majority of these studies were funded by the pharmaceutical companies that made the vaccine being tested… but even they couldn’t make the vaccines look good.
In an interview published in The Atlantic, Jefferson was scathing about the quality of these studies:
“Rubbish is not a scientific term, but I think it’s the term that applies.”
And yet despite a total lack of evidence that mass flu vaccination is effective or safe, the Australian government continues to aggressively push mass flu vaccination to all adults (including pregnant women and the elderly), children and Indigenous people.
Here’s a screenshot from the Department of Health’s Immunise Australia website:
Click through to the page Updated 4.7 influenza chapter and you can read the influenza chapter from the Australian Immunisation Handbook 10th Edition, which states that
“The administration of influenza vaccine to persons at risk of complications of infection is the single most important measure in preventing or attenuating influenza infection and preventing mortality.”
So how does this claim square with Cochrane’s findings? It seems that when it comes to flu vaccination, faith-based medicine trumps evidence-based medicine every time. That would be no surprise to Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Seattle-based Group Health Research Center.
Curious about the claim that flu vaccination reduced winter death rates in the elderly by up to 50%, Jackson collected data from over 72 000 individuals aged 65 years and over, who were followed for 8 years. After painstaking analysis, Jackson’s team concluded that the observed reduction in death rate was entirely attributable to the ‘healthy-user effect’ – that is, people who were at the lowest risk of suffering lethal complications from the flu were more likely to get the flu vaccine than those at highest risk. It wasn’t the vaccine that was protecting those who received it; it was their pre-existing health status. The vaccine wasn’t saving lives at all.
“[Her papers] are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”
“For a vaccine to reduce mortality by 50 percent and up to 90 percent in some studies means it has to prevent deaths not just from influenza, but also from falls, fires, heart disease, strokes, and car accidents. That’s not a vaccine, that’s a miracle.”
- “It’s important to get the flu shot every year because the flu virus is constantly changing.” – Yes it is constantly changing, and that is what makes the flu vaccine so ineffective; the flu virus mutates so rapidly that selection of viral strains for inclusion in a vaccine can only ever be an educated guess.
- “Most people only get sick for a week but some people get sicker and need to go to hospital. The flu can cause pneumonia or bronchitis, and can make some existing illnesses worse. Some people can die from the flu.” – That’s true, and it’s very sad, but getting a flu vaccine won’t stop that from happening, according to the Cochrane review: “Vaccination shows no appreciable effect on working days lost or hospitalisation;” and as Lisa Jackson found, the vaccine won’t stop you from dying of flu complications either.
- “But the flu can be prevented [by vaccines].” Ummm, not in any clinically meaningful way. According to the Cochrane review on flu vaccination in adults, “The preventive effect of parenteral inactivated influenza vaccine on healthy adults is small: at least 40 people would need vaccination to avoid one ILI [influenza-like illness] case… and 71 people would need vaccination to prevent one case of influenza.” That means that somewhere between 39 and 70 people are not going to receive any benefit from the vaccine, but are still at risk from harm. I’m not a gambler, but those don’t sound like particularly good odds to me.
- “The flu vaccine is recommended for pregnant women and can be safely given during any stage of pregnancy. Pregnant women are at higher risk of severe complications associated with the flu. Vaccinating against the flu during pregnancy also provides protection for babies during their first vulnerable months of life.” – Not according to the Cochrane Collaboration, who concluded “The protection against ILI that is given by the administration of inactivated influenza vaccine to pregnant women is uncertain or at least very limited; the effect on their newborns is not statistically significant.”
It’s interesting when you delve into the medical literature to find out what doctors really think about flu vaccination.
The British Medical Journal, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, published an article by Margaret McCartney in 2014 titled ‘What use is mass flu vaccination?’ Dr McCartney, a GP and part time undergraduate tutor at the University of Glasgow, tore strips off the National Health Service’s “Flu Fighter” campaign:
“In return for vaccination, hospitals have offered their staff entry into cash prize draws, as well as chocolates, lollipops, cakes, biscuits, stickers that read “I’m a Flu Fighter,” and even an extra day’s annual leave, some freedom of information requests have shown. But will those days off work be offset by the average 0.04 days saved through vaccination?
Treating children is one thing; treating adults like children is quite another. The Department of Health wants trusts to achieve a 75% uptake in flu vaccination for staff, when it would be better off ensuring that resources are used where they can do some good.”
Dr McCartney called for randomised controlled trials of the vaccine in healthy over 65s and healthcare workers, at the very least. Good luck with that. Randomised, placebo-controlled trials – the standard used in studies performed to establish the effectiveness of other drugs – are considered ‘unethical’ when it comes to vaccines, because it is assumed that vaccines are safe and effective.
Tom Jefferson counters this circular reasoning with devastatingly simple logic:
“What do you do when you have uncertainty? You test. We have built huge, population-based policies on the flimsiest of scientific evidence. The most unethical thing to do is to carry on business as usual.”
Representing the American perspective, the exceedingly mainstream physicians’ resource Medscape published an article titled Flu Vaccine for All: A Critical Look at the Evidence, by two pro-vaccination pediatricians, which slammed the US government’s policy of mass flu vaccination and raised the valid question,
“If the data supporting widespread influenza vaccination are weak, then why do such organizations as the AAP [American Academy of Pediatrians – their own professional organisation], ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices], and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) support a widespread influenza vaccination policy?”
I have my own theories about the answer to this question, but I’d love to hear from you:
Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.
In summary, the behaviour of medical authorities when it comes to flu vaccination calls to mind Dr Robert Mendelsohn’s 1979 classic Confessions of a Medical Heretic, in which he characterised modern medicine not as a science-based enterprise but as a church, complete with priests (doctors), religious dogma (unfounded beliefs about health and disease), rituals (practices that offer no health benefit, such as routine tonsillectomies and hysterectomies, which were much more in vogue in his time than now) and heresy (any opinion opposed to standard doctrines).
The manner in which health authorities approach flu vaccination is more akin to how fundamentalist religions deal with heresy than with how scientists deal with legitimate controversy. An honest and searching scientific debate on this topic is urgently required; the accepted tools by which controversies are resolved – double blind, placebo controlled trials – need to be employed in government-funded flu vaccine studies to reduce the risk of bias; and the witch-hunting of anyone who questions the dogma needs to stop. Now.
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