Though in some cases I am pro-vaccine, I am not pro-flu vaccine, because its effectiveness remains unproven and its safety in question.
The importance of vaccines in advancing public health cannot be overstated. Last year, after the earthquake in Haiti, I cared for a man dying of tetanus. There is no excuse for his death. Today, even in the remotest villages on the planet, villages without television and cell service people can quench their thirst with a bottle of Coca-Cola. We should have been able provide a vaccine for tetanus. Sanitation, clean water and other social and structural changes in society led to the reduction of deaths from infectious disease. Smallpox has been eradicated through a global vaccination policy. Whopping cough, polio and other childhood diseases have been reduced through successful vaccination programs. Vaccinations are one of the greatest advances in medicine in the 20th century.
But just because vaccinations have worked so well for prevention of some diseases, does not mean that all vaccines are effective or safe. Vaccinations are a medical procedure and should be subject to the same standard of evidence and rigorous scientific inquiry before strong recommendations are made for their global application by government institutions.
Should Our Government Strongly Recommend the Flu Vaccine?
The wholesale acceptance and promotion of the flu vaccine by government agencies, heath care institutions, pharmacies and physicians is at best based on flimsy, flawed or inadequate evidence. And at worst, it pushes a potentially harmful medical procedure on a poorly informed public.
Consider this. What consumer product creates billions in profits for it manufacturer every year and is recommended and almost mandated by our government to be used by all Americans over six months old? The flu vaccine.
Not only does our government's public health marketing campaigns generate billions in profits for vaccine manufacturers, but those companies are protected from legal liability by the U.S. government. Yes, that's right. If a vaccine harms or kills an American citizen, the government will pick up the legal bill and the settlement for damages. This would be an acceptable risk if flu vaccines were proven to be effective and were free of side-effects such as the life threatening paralysis called Guillain-Barre Syndrome that affects one in a million flu vaccine recipients. If all "eligible" Americans were vaccinated there were be 300 lives adversely affected. But unfortunately unlike many other vaccines, medications and medical procedures in use today, the flu vaccine has not passed the scientific litmus test.
What the Science Says About the Flu Vaccine
Let's briefly review the evidence for and against the flu vaccine based on an independent objective scientific, comprehensive review of ALL the evidence. And let's look at a few logical holes in our current thinking and public policy about vaccines.
Top line, here are the conclusions. For those who want to dig deep and decide for themselves I encourage you to read the recent review paper by the international, independent, non-profit Cochrane Collaboration group published in July of 2010.
1. A comprehensive of the flu research in healthy adults aged 18-65 from 1960 to the present including over 40 clinical trials with over 70,000 people found no evidence of benefit for the flu vaccine. Most trials were poorly done, or inadequate to reach clear conclusions. Only the best 50 studies were included in the final analysis.
2. The only studies that showed benefit were industry funded. Despite this bias they tended to be published in the most prestigious journals and were the ones most widely quoted, while the publicly funded studies were less likely to show favorable conclusions.
3. They found cases of severe harm and inadequate reporting of adverse effects of the flu vaccine.
4. There are different 200+ strains of flu and viruses that infect people every year. The vaccine covers only about 10 percent of the virus strains that make people sick.
5. If the vaccine strain given in a particular vaccination happened to match the virus caught by the vaccinated person, the likelihood of getting sick from the flu was only reduced from 4 percent to 1 percent.
6. There was NO evidence that the vaccine reduced transmission of the flu (a major rationale for mass vaccination) or complications such as pneumonia (another major justification).
7. These conclusions included the data from biased industry studies yet still found no benefit except small reductions in flu symptoms in some industry studies.
8. They warned that their already negative conclusions may be UNDERSTATED because of the inclusion of industry funded studies in their review.
Authors of scientific papers tend to understate their conclusions. They report findings in neutral language and let that data speak for itself. However, these independent researchers concluded this review with the following statement about the flu vaccine.
The review showed that reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin but there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies. The content and conclusions of this review should be interpreted in light of this finding.
...The results of this review seem to discourage the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure. As healthy adults have a low risk of complications due to respiratory disease, the use of the vaccine may be only advised as an individual protection measure against symptoms in specific cases.
That is why it is perplexing to me that our Centers for Disease Control recently changed its policy advising vaccination only for sick or at risk populations to ALL Americans over six months of age.
If the science doesn't support use in healthy adults from 18 to 65, then what about other at risk populations? Unfortunately the story is not much better there.
Why We Should Think Twice About Getting the Flu Vaccine
Industry studies typically claim that the vaccine will reduce the winter death rate by half in vaccinated individuals. Sounds great, but researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases found that deaths from illnesses that the flu aggravates like heart failure or lung disease, account for only 10 percent of winter deaths in the elderly. Dr. Jefferson from the Cochrane Collaborative said that industry claims of a 50 percent to 90 percent reduction in ALL deaths in the winter would have to include reduction of deaths from falls, fires, heart disease, stroke and car accidents. "That's not a vaccine, that's a miracle," he said.
Other bits of data also call into question the effectiveness and usefulness of vaccines. In 2004, vaccine production dropped leading to a 40 percent reduction in vaccination rates. But death rates that flu season did not increase. In other years, 1968 and 1997, the strain of vaccines produced didn't match the circulating viruses that season, which meant that, in effect, nobody was vaccinated those years. And yet death rates from all diseases including flu related illness did not change at all.
Also reductions in sickness and death rates in vaccinated individuals may be due to the health user effect. People who are motivated to take care of themselves -- eat better, exercise, get enough sleep, take vitamins -- are also the ones most likely to take advantage of vaccines and preventive medicine. Avoiding the flu for them might have nothing to do with actually getting the vaccine. These types of studies are "cohort" studies -- observing populations over time. They are not intervention studies, which control for confounding factors like the healthy user effect.
Dr. Lisa Jackson tested this hypothesis in over 72,000 people 65 and older and found that those who did NOT get the flu shot were 60 percent more likely to die OUTSIDE of flu season. They died because they were sicker to start with. And the vaccine recipients didn't die at the same rate because they were healthy! Also the ability of the vaccination in the elderly to create an immune response and bolster immunity against the flu is impaired. Young adults have a better immune response, but as we have seen, they don't benefit from the vaccine in terms of reductions in transmission, hospitalization or severe illness. So the ones who may benefit, the elderly, the vaccine doesn't take.
This same blunder based on the "healthy user effect" occurred with Premarin. During the height of the hormone craze after the "cohort" Nurses Health Study showed that the hormone users were 50 percent less likely to have heart attacks, over 50 million women took Premarin. One of my patients said her gynecologist told her it was malpractice NOT to prescribe estrogen. It was unethical not to prescribe estrogen to all menopausal women we were told. But only until the National Institute of Health's randomized controlled study known as the Women's health initiative, found that in fact Premarin cause 50 percent more heart attacks, strokes and breast cancer. Then, overnight, our recommendations changed.
Many vaccine advocates suggest that it is unethical to withhold vaccinations from the population because of the evidence (however weak we now know) of benefit. Giving some vaccines and other sham vaccines to study effectiveness and safety is not unethical. It is called science, and until we have clear evidence of benefit from randomized controlled trials we should not have government policy advocating mass vaccination while protecting vaccine manufacturers lawsuits due to any harm.
Individuals self-selecting to get a vaccine while understanding the risks and potential benefits (or lack thereof) are one thing. But government policies, advocacy and marketing of unproven vaccines that generates billions in profits for industry while absolving them manufacturers of proving effectiveness and protecting them from any liability must be changed to match the objective evidence. Shouldn't the government be in the business of protecting citizens and not corporations.
The false sense of safety from vaccination often prevents people from doing the very things we know work to prevent viral illness including washing our hands, staying home when sick, getting more sleep, eating a healthy diet, getting moderate exercise and taking some basic nutritional supplementation. A randomized trial of 1200 U of vitamin D a day reduced the risk of getting the seasonal flu by 42 percent. Now that's an easier pill to swallow.
Mark Hyman, M.D. is a practicing physician, founder of The UltraWellness Center, a four-time New York Times bestselling author, and an international leader in the field of Functional Medicine. You can follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, watch his videos on YouTube, become a fan on Facebook, and subscribe to his newsletter.
Follow Mark Hyman, MD on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markhymanmd
David Katz, M.D.: A Closer Look At Medical Research
William Schaffner, M.D. and Richard H. Carmona, M.D.: Flu Shots: Public Health Begins With You
CDC - Seasonal Influenza (Flu) - Key Facts About Seasonal Flu Vaccine
CDC - Seasonal Influenza (Flu) - Q & A: Seasonal Flu Shot
Influenza vaccine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Influenza Vaccine (Flu Shot) Facts, Vaccination Side Effects and ...
Learn About Flu Shot -- the Influenza Vaccine -- and Its Side Effects
In fact the issue has become somewhat heated with a more recent Cochrane review finding the same thing from
.... "The July 2010 Cochrane Database Review of 50 studies of flu vaccine use in healthy adults showed once again that these vaccines are not effective for those adults (Jefferson 2010). This confirms a previous review from 2007. ..........
The authors also note widespread misrepresentation of the conclusions that were reached in these reviews. They berate official government articles that misquote their findings to justify actions previously taken to recommend flu vaccines. Articles from the Centers for Disease Control that quote the Cochrane reviews misrepresent the efficacy of the flu vaccine to serve an agenda that promotes the use of these vaccines. Their conclusion: "The CDC authors clearly do not weight interpretation by quality of the evidence, but quote anything that supports their theory."
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030744_flu_vaccines_fraud.html#ixzz1GLJfxvKf
What's effective mean? If you give influenza vaccine to healthy adults and children, studies show that the vaccine is effective in reducing the number of cases of actual influenza.
From a preventing death point of view, what the Cochrane leaves out is that vaccinating healthy adults and ESPECIALLY children is a great way to protect the rest of the community against influenza. That includes the elderly who die the most from influenza but are not protected well by current vaccines.
Readers, remember the intention of vinceeally. He isn't that interested in the details of the Cochrane reports. Rather the intention is to discourage influenza vaccination. That's Ok, if you don't mind grandma and grandpa being more likely to die.
'Michael Osterholm, who directs the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy........"These 36,000 deaths that we keep talking about with the flu, that we want to get people vaccinated for so they don't happen, really is not going to occur. And we have to be honest about that," Osterholm said. ..." http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/04/27/flu-vaccine-not-effective-in-elderly/
Sheldon if people want to take flu vaccines that is fine but as Dr. Osterholm noted it is about time we be 'honest'. about the risk and benefits.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-acthib-vaccine-recalled-japan.html
If you cannot trust these drug makers quality control measures, to ensure your health why on earth would you trust the carcinogens in vaccines -won't kill you or your kids first?
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Hydra8 believes the official reports that 4 children were reported to have died after vaccination. Hyrda8 states that official reports that the deaths of the children were not caused by vaccination "lies."
What's the difference? Hydra8 is an extreme vaccination opponent. Hydra8 is less interested in the factual truth than in scaring parents to take decisions that will put their children and the entire community at risk.
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Mumps causes aseptic meningitis. This is a scary condition that children get over completely. Amazingly, aseptic meningitis does not cause permanent harm. About 1 in 10 cases of natural mumps infection results in aseptic meningitis. Mumps causes deafness and other complications.
The Urabe strain of weakened mumps used as a vaccine causes aseptic meningitis in 1 in 10000 cases. The Jeryl-Lynn strain of weakened mumps causes zero cases.
Canada, the UK and Japan used MMR vaccine with Urabe. All three stopped using it. Canada and the UK did the sensible thing and switched to a Jeryl-Lynn MMR. The Japanese just stopped using MMR in 1992 and stopped vaccinating against Mumps. There rate of single disease measles vaccine use also dropped.
The result is over a 100,000 (probably greatly more) reported cases of mumps a year. And they are in the midst of a massive measles vaccine campaign.
So the Japanese just have somewhat weird attitudes towards vaccination.This may explain their bizarre reaction.
that was Fluezone http://video.foxnews.com/v/4505335/new-flu-shot-giving-young-kids-seizures/
Vaccines prevent those infectious diseases.
So why are advocating measures that will result in more people having conditions that require daily drugs that have a choke hold on our health?
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
What are the parents feeling for NOT vaccinating their children ? Or any other parent who's child has died from the lack of vaccination?
Flu shot given by needle is made by growing the virus and then chemically killing it and using detergent to break it up. A virus which is chemically killed and broken up simply cannot create more virus. So no one can get influenza or transmit influenza from a dead virus vaccine.
Flumist is a live vaccine virus, but the virus is genetically messed up and is made so that it will only grow in the nasal tract. It will not grow in the lungs. It is possible to transmit Flumist from one person to another, but what is transmitted isn't regular influenza virus, but Flumist.
Oops.
What happened in Poland last year with the H1N1 flu? They were the only country I know of that turned down the vaccine? Did they have more H1N1 flu, less H1N1 flu or the same amount as the surrounding nations that accepted the vaccine? How about deaths?
It would be the perfect test case for the efficacy of the H1N1 vaccine in the real world, doncha think?
Seems that notifications for 2009-2010 were on average quite a bit higher in Poland than for other years.
So maybe not getting the vaccine wasn't such a good idea. But who knows how much there was compared to vaccinating countiries? Hard to find comparable data and the axis units are not clear.
Germany:
http://influenza.rki.de/Wochenberichte/2010_2011/2011-08.pdf
"March 7, 2011 Pfizer Vaccines kill four children in Japan
Japan has halted vaccines for pneumonia and meningitis in that country made by Pfizer Inc from the United States and Sanofi Aventis of France for brand name vaccines Prevenar and ACTHIB respectively.
The four children who died were only ages six months old to only two years old who received vaccines on March 2 to March 4, 2011.
Vaccines have been implicated in many deaths of perfectly healthy children, babies, adults and elderly adults through the past two decades. Testing for vaccines is hardly indicative of their safety and governments tend to take the drug companies word for the safety of their own products. During the H1N1 swine flu vaccines of 2010 numerous people got sick and pregnant mothers lost their fetuses after being injected with the H1N1 Vaccine and yet the US government has completed no investigations into the deaths."
http://www.politicolnews.com/pfizer-vaccines-kill-4-children-in-japan/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/03/08/japan-vaccine.html
Healthy children an adults who get the flu are going to be sick but almost always get better.The flu shot works very well in this group.
Having healthy children and adults vaccinated, contributes to 'source drying.' That is very important for the elderly and those in whom the vaccine is not effective.
At my personal, non-commercial blog I explain the issues. See http://vaccineswork.blogspot.com/2010/11/vaccinating-kids-against-flu-helps.html
EXACTLY. 100% right on and logical Dr Hyman.
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Dr. Hyman' s training in medical ethics should have included the concept of clinical equipose. Essentially, if we already know treatment A is better than treatment B, we can't pretend that we don't know this and do a study in which some participants get treatment A and some treatment B.
The world knows that influenza vaccines are safe and effective. The world will not allow tests of a placebo versus a real vaccine in a population where there is already a recommendation to vaccinate. That's why this type of test won't be done in the US. In other places and populations it may be allowed. But the recent trend has been to use a vaccine against a different disease as the control. This was the case in the recent study that showed how Great vaccinating pregnant women in Bangledesh protected their newborns from influenza.
Dr. Hyman may have his views on medical ethics, but he should acknowledge that they will not govern research.
WRONG. Tthats the point at issue Sheldon The effectiveness of the flu vaccine has NOT been proven. If it had been, I would tend to agree with you.
Show me a randomized controlled trial of the flu vaccine. You cant. And thats why Jacksons papers exploring the healthy user effect undermine the claims of efficacy.
But once again, the CDC and medical establishment is more interested in protecting the vaccine industry than finding the truth.
Thats why Dr Hyman is right and you are wrong.
Easy.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/303/10/943.full?home
Voted by readers of the Lancet as their "Paper of the year" for 2010
http://www.nutraingredients-usa.com/Health-condition-categories/Immune-system/Canada-examines-vitamin-D-for-swine-flu-protection
How long will it take for the CDC to take similar action? The minds of U.S. public health officials are closed to all options except the hugely expensive, but scientifically unproven flu vaccine.
Besides, if you read real research articles in pubmed, most of which are done by University researchers not funded by companies, you will find there is enough scientific evidence about how influenza vaccines work.
Leave the science to the scientists like virologists and immunologists, or an MD who actually knows something about research, and not about how to sell the next fix it all pill.
The vaccine is safe.