Gary Null: A Forgotten Medical Truth: Flu Vaccination is Not Effective

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Jan092013

January 9, 2013

A Forgotten Medical Truth: Flu Vaccination is Not Effective

The Great Flu Vaccine Hoax

Research Shows the Flu Vaccine is Not Effective or Safe

Gary Null & Richard Gale

Progressive Radio Network, January 8, 2013

According to all official health reports, we are now fully in flu season. It is that time of year when almost every public health official, physician, pediatrician and pharmacist is warning that everyone over 6 months of age should protect themselves and get vaccinated. Most Americans, believing the public relation efforts to push the flu vaccine, will join the inoculation lines without pausing to consider whether or not the flu vaccine is effective and safe.

Increasingly over the years, we are witnessing the appearance of “scientific” studies that are little more than commercials, public relation sound bytes, to promote vaccination’s efficacy. Today a highly flawed medical trial conducted by a pharmaceutical corporation has a greater chance of being published in a more prestigious medical journal than does medical designed research conducted by an independent scientist without conflicts of interest with government or private industries. When we question why this would be the case, we can only draw the conclusion that such research is more often than not promotional spin designed to support the financial interests of the corporate party. This is particularly true of vaccine science, and is solely published in order to influence the nation’s health policy makers and physicians, and to relieve doubts concerning their vaccine’s efficacy and safety. The nation’s health agencies then rely on these fabrications to convince the larger public healthcare community and citizens about the importance of vaccination. And this scenario is particularly true for the flu vaccine.

There is only one big question that needs to be answered: what is the real gold standard proof to claim that the flu vaccine is efficacious for any given individual? The question whether or not the flu vaccine is safe becomes secondary if the vaccine’s efficacy is negligible or useless. In that case, there would be no convincing scientific rationale for administering the vaccine in the first place. During the past four years, since the hype and subsequent fizzle of the H1N1 scare in 2008, we have done an extensive review of the scientific literature and analysis of flu vaccination, and the results are startling.

In a recent interview with Dr. Thomas Jefferson, coordinator for the Cochrane Vaccine Field in Rome, Italy, he said that in 2009 he conducted a thorough review of 217 published studies on flu vaccines and found only 5% reliable. In other words, 95% of studies on flu vaccination are flawed and should therefore be ignored. This should not come as a great surprise; even CDC officials were forced to confess that “influenza vaccines are still among the least effective immunizing agents available, and this seems to be particularly true for elderly recipients.”[1] Dr. Anthony Morris, a distinguished virologist and a former Chief Vaccine Office at the FDA, found “there is no evidence that any influenza vaccine thus far developed is effective in preventing or mitigating any attack of influenza.’ Dr. Morris states, “The producers of these vaccines know they are worthless, but they go on selling them anyway.”[2]

Pregnant Women and the Flu Vaccine

The CDC’s website states, “if you are pregnant, a flu shot is your best protection against serious illness from the flu. A flu shot can protect pregnant women, their unborn babies and even the baby after birth.” Is there any scientific truth to this claim?[3]

First, very few vaccine studies have been performed on pregnant women. And none of them, according to Dr. Jefferson are “high quality” studies. While some extremely poor trials have been conducted, the CDC’s National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease, research into the potential dangers and risks of the flu vaccine to both mom and fetus is negligible. After evaluating all flu vaccine studies on pregnant women, and finding them “artificial” in the way there designed and carried out, Dr. Jefferson concludes that “I would be very very cautious about vaccinating unborn babies.”[4]

Children and the Flu Vaccine

When the CDC launched new swine flu vaccine in 2009, it recommended children as young as 6 months be vaccinated. All FDA-approved intramuscular flu vaccines comprise an inactivated virus. So is there any evidence that inactivated viral influenza vaccines are effective in very young children? In our own research, we have not found any convincing scientific evidence. However, some of the most damning evidence was reported in two studies performed by Dr. Tom Jefferson at the Cochrane Group and published in The Lancet and the prestigious Cochrane Database Systems Review. His first study was a systematic review of the effects of influenza vaccines in healthy children.[5] The second was a review of all available published and unpublished safety evidence available regarding the flu vaccine.[6] The authors of the study had also contacted the lead scientists or research groups for all the efficacy and safety trial studies under their review in order to gain access to additional unpublished trial studies the corporations may possess. The conclusions are shocking. The only safety study found for an inactivated flu vaccine was conducted in 1976. And that single study enrolled only 35 children aged 12-28 months. Every other subsequent inactivated flu vaccine study enrolled only children 3 years and older.

In a review of more than 51 studies involving over 294,000 children, there was “no evidence that injecting children 6-24 months of age with a flu shot was any more effective than placebo. In children over 2 years of age, flu vaccine effectiveness was 33 percent of the time preventing flu. [7]

Dr. Jefferson told Reuters, “Immunization of very young children is not lent support by our findings. We recorded no convincing evidence that vaccines can reduce mortality, [hospital] admissions, serious complications and community transmission of influenza. In young children below the age of 2, we could find no evidence that the vaccine was different from a placebo.”[8]

A live virus vaccine is available via nasal administration. As for this vaccine, no safety studies have been performed on children younger than 22 months. Of course a live flu vaccine, with an active virus, can make the recipient potentially contagious. National Vaccine Information Prevention founder and president Barbara Lo Fisher concurs: “The live virus activated vaccine has the ability to spread flu.”[9] Medimmune, the sole manufacturer of the live flu nasal vaccine, repeatedly refused to give unpublished data to Dr. Jefferson without executive clearance. This was also true for some vaccine makers working with inactive virus.

The Elderly and the Flu Vaccine

In 64 studies involving 66,000 healthy adults, “Vaccination of healthy adults only reduced risk of influenza by 6 percent and reduced the number of missed work days by less than one day. There was no change in the number of hospitalizations compared to the non-vaccinated.” [10] So if this is true of healthy adults, what about the flu vaccine’s efficacy among the elderly?

The flu vaccines has been shown to be less effective among the elderly, people over 65 years of age, than other age groups. Nevertheless, the over-65 population remains a primary target for vaccination. There have been many studies conducted in nursing homes to determine how effective flu vaccines are in preventing infection. Average effectiveness, meaning only to stimulate an adequate immune response, are in the low to mid twenty percent range (21-27 percent). Another set of four studies indicates the flu vaccine was 0, 2, 8 and 9 percent effective.[11] Yet despite some of these dismal results, the CDC still wishes us to believe that vaccinating elderly citizens is “50-60% effective in preventing hospitalization and pneumonia and 80% effective in preventing death.[12]

Government health projections confirm, and the CDC has had to acknowledge this, that elderly people, with or without the flu shot, show less than a one percent rate of being hospitalized for pneumonia and influenza. That means that 99 percent of elderly people manage to weather the storm.[13]

An important Dutch study was conducted in a large home for the elderly. In spite of two thirds of them having been vaccinated, the flu infected 49% of them, including bacterial and pneumonia infections, and 10% died. The critical observation found in the study was that 50% of those vaccinated got the disease whereas 48% of non-vaccinated people were infected. The results of this study clearly show that vaccination was useless.[14]

Asthma and the Flu Vaccine

Vaccine opponents claim that one of the adverse effects of vaccination is the onset of asthmatic conditions. A great way to counter this attack is to make the claim that flu vaccination will reduce asthmatic attacks brought on by flu infection among those children who are most susceptible to them. In fact, this is what the vaccine industry claims.

A study by Dr. Herman Bueving at the Department of Family Practice at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, conducted one of the few randomized, double-blind placebo studies found in vaccine literature. The two-year study enrolled 696 asthmatic children, half vaccinated and the rest administered a placebo. The study found there was no difference between the number and severity of asthmatic attacks between the two groups. This study gives further support in flu vaccination’s ineffectiveness.[15]

In fact, in children with asthma, inactivated flu vaccine did not prevent influenza related hospitalizations in children. The database shows that children who received the flu vaccine were at a higher risk of hospitalization than children who did not receive the vaccine. In a separate study involving 400 children with asthma receiving a flu vaccine and 400 who were not immunized, there was no difference in the number of clinic and emergency room visits and hospitalizations between the two groups.[16]

Concealing Research Data

If the influenza vaccine were effective and safe and corporations had strong evidence to proof this, then why is so much data held by vaccine makers concealed from government drug regulatory agencies, the scientific community and the public?

Independent vaccine investigators and scientists, with no vested interest in the vaccine industrial complex, and who wish to preserve high standards of scientific integrity, face much resistance and find themselves hamstrung to gain access to necessary scientific and clinical trial data from the vaccine industrial complex and their federal guardians. This has hindered proper evaluation of vaccines. Federal agencies do not regulate what a corporation does or does not do with its clinical data on vaccine efficacy and safety. All that is required from vaccine makers is the necessary documentation required for FDA submission in order for approval and registration. All other data is sealed in a proprietary vault off-limits to the scientific community unless such wishes for access be sanctioned by the corporations. This in itself is a violation of the highest ethics of true medical science, which by definition should be a quest for discovering and confirming medical facts and by sharing information publicly so scientists can further their knowledge to find the best solutions for tackling our health problems and solutions for them.

Dr. Jefferson states, “We believe all unpublished trial safety data should be readily accessible to both the regulatory bodies and the scientific community on request. Our evidence gives rise to a concern that lack of access to unreported data prevents published data being put into context and hinders full and independent review. This cannot be good for public confidence in these vaccines.”[17]

A scientific study in review for peer-reviewed publication was reported on CTV, Canada’s largest private television network, on September 23, 2009. The study, conducted in three Canadian provinces—British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec—by Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, raised serious concerns over the potential efficacy of the flu vaccine based upon new data showing that a person vaccinated with last year’s seasonal vaccine is more susceptible to contracting the H1N1 virus.[18]

Flu Vaccine Safety

Over the decades I have interviewed many of the world’s most knowledgeable vaccine scientists, researchers and physicians working with children who have been victims of vaccination. Among the questions I routinely ask, is whether or not there is any evidence that vaccine makers conduct randomized double-blind placebo studies to determine efficacy and safety. Throughout true science, this protocol has served as the gold standard. And never have I ever heard anyone in the entire medical community, nor any of my own research, say they found evidence for randomized double-blind placebo studies ever being conducted in vaccine trials.

The use of placebos most commonly used in vaccination trials is exceedingly important. In standard scientific methodology a placebo should be a very inert substance, such as water or a sugar substance, in order to accurately determine the tested substance’s effects on human biology. According to Australian vaccine historian Dr. Viera Scheibner, vaccine trials do not employ an inert placebo. Instead, what is used as a placebo is “the vaccine with all the adjuvants and preservatives, certainly not inert substances, minus those viruses and bacteria… That is why when they compare the trial children who were given the lot and those who were given placebo, they have the same rate of reaction.”[19] This means that almost all vaccine efficacy and safety trials using a non-inert placebo are based on scientifically flawed design from the start. It is therefore evident that flawed methodology will inevitably result in flawed data. Yet that is the guiding principle the vaccine industrial complex relies upon, and our federal health establishment is all too ready to give a nod of approval and allow it to continue.

If there is no compelling scientific evidenced that flu vaccines are effective and have a high degree of certainty of protecting us from flu infection, then it is criminal to suggest that the vaccine should be made mandatory.

Flu Vaccine Mandates

The recent push to mandate flu vaccines for American healthcare workers is not the first time mandatory flu vaccines have been tried. During the 1980s, Japan had mandatory flu vaccination for school children. Two large scale studies that enrolled children from four cities with vaccination rates up to 90 percent discovered there was no difference in the incidences of flu infection. As a result, in 1987, Japanese health authorities ruled that flu vaccination was ineffective and was no more than a serious liability if it was to continue. The mandatory policy was quickly overturned. By 1989, the numbers of Japanese taking the flu vaccine dropped to 20 percent. A follow up study at that time found that there was statistically insignificant change in influenza infection rates compared to when the vaccine was mandatory.[20]

In recent years we are now seeing supposed scientific studies emerging that are nothing more than commercials, public relation spectacles, to promote vaccination’s efficacy. Such studies either remain unpublished or are reinvented for publication well after the fact. Their sole purpose is to confuse a negative with a positive twist. They are no more than promotional spins designed by the vaccine industrial complex, and their cohorts in other private health sectors, to support their financial interests. In turn, they are used as a means to influence the nation’s health policy makers, relieve any doubts concerning their vaccine’s efficacy and safety. The nation’s health agencies then rely on these fabrications to convince the larger public healthcare community and citizens about the importance of being vaccinated.

Hygiene is More Effective than the Flu Vaccine

In a curious twist of fate, corporations, far removed from drug and vaccine development, but also obligated to test and market their own products, conduct studies that contradict the dogma of the pharmaceutical industrial complex. Procter and Gamble have conducted numerous studies on their common household products such as soap and liquid detergents. One such study was a randomized, placebo study of 611 hundred households, in 36 separate neighborhoods, in Karachi, Pakistan to determine whether frequent use of a common hand soap, an antibacterial (promotional) soap and a placebo soap would reduce the rate of lung infections due to pneumonia among children.

Proctor and Gambles results are quite startling with a fifty percent lower incidence of pneumonia infections among children under five with the plain and antibacterial soaps compared to placebo. There was also a 53 percent reduction in diarrhea and a 34 percent decrease in incidences of impetigo.

When we review the FDA’s and CDC’s flawed methodology for promulgating their myth that 36,000 Americans die annually from flu infections, we will see that over 90 percent of these mortalities are a result of pneumonia infections, not the influenza.

While this may appear to be an irrelevant example, it compliments Dr. Jefferson’s research at the Cochrane group. His conclusion about the flu vaccine is, “People should ask whether it’s worth investing these trillions of dollars and euros in these vaccines.. What you see is that marketing rules the response to influenza and scientific evidence comes fourth or fifth. The best strategy to prevent illness is to wash your hands.”[21] [22] And if you are among those who would hold Dr. Jefferson suspect, then even the FDA’s and CDC’s 1999 directive to manufacturers to remove mercury from vaccines recommends that the safest and most effective way to prevent flu infections is frequent hand washing and a healthy lifestyle.[23]

[1] Kidder D, Scmitz R. Measures of costs and morbidity in the analysis of vaccine effectiveness based on Medicare claims. In Hannoun C, et al. Eds. Options for the Control of Influenza 11. Amsterdam: Excerpts Medica, 1993; 127-33.

[2] Patrick, Jay. “Flu Vaccines ‘Worthless’ Says Eminent FDA Virologist.”

[3] Pregnant Women Need a Flu Shot http://www.cdc.gov/features/pregnancyandflu/

[4] Interview with Dr. Tom Jefferson, “The Gary Null Show” Progressive Radio Network, January 8, 2012 www.prn.fm

[5] Jefferson T, Smith S, Demicheli V, Harnden A, Rivetti A. Assessment of the efficacy and effectiveness of influenza in healthy children: systemic review. The Lancet 2005; 365: 773-780.

[6] Smith S, Demicheli V, Jefferson T, Harnden T. Matheson N, Di Pietrontonj C. Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy children. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2004. 3:CD004879.

[7] Tenpenny, Sherri. “The Truth about Flu Shots”. Idaho Observer, June 1, 2009.

[8] Reaney, Patricia. “No Evidence Flu Shots Work for Under-2s: Study. Reuters, September 22, 2005; Jefferson, Tom. “Safety of influenza vaccines in children.” The Lancet, 2005. 366:803-804.

[9] Dupre, Deborah. “The Big Lie: H1N1 Coincidences, Contradictions and Conspiring.” The Philadelphia Examiner. August 27, 2009.

[10] Tenpenny, Sherri. “The Truth about Flu Shots”. Idaho Observer, June 1, 2009.

[11] Severyn, Kristine. “Flu Shots: Do They Really Work?” www.vran.org

[12] Prevention and control of influenza: recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices 9 ACIP. MMWR 4/21/95; 44 (rr-3).

[13] Flu prevention campaign underway. Health Care Financing Administration press office. HHS News, 1016/95. US Department of Health and Human Services.

Dowdle WR. Influenza Immunoprophylaxis after 30 years experience. In Nayak DP, ed. Genetic Variation Among Influenza Viruses. New York: Academic Press, 1981: 525-34.

[14] Beyer WEP et al. “Influenza-epdiemie in een verpleeghuis door een virus dat niet in het vaccine was opgenomen. Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd. 1993; 137/39: 1973-7.

[15] Neustaeder, Randal. The Vaccine Guide. North Atlantic Books: Berkeley, 2005.

[16] 105^th International Conference of the American Thoracic Sociey, May 15-20, 2009 (quoted in , Sherri. “The Truth about Flu Shots”. Idaho Observer, June 1, 2009)

[17] Jefferson T, Smith S, Demicheli V, Harnden A, Rivetti A. Assessment of the efficacy and effectiveness of influenza in healthy children: systemic review. The Lancet 2005; 365: 773-780.

[18] CTV News Staff. “Unpublished Study Raises Questions About Flu Shot.” CTV.ca September 23, 2009.

[19] Interview with Dr. Viera Scheibner. Broadcast WPFW, Washington DC. September 21, 2009. Archived at http://garynull.org

[20] http://www.whale.to/vaccines/flu7.html

[21] Rosenthal, Elisabeth. “Two studies question the effectiveness of flu vaccines.” New York Times, September 21, 2005.

[22] Stein, Rob. “Studies question flu vaccines” The Washington Post, reprinted in the Seattle Times, September 25, 2005.

[23] Paraphrased from reference in “Influenza : The Disease and the Vaccine.” Vaccine Risk Awareness Network. www.vran.org