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It is fall and another flu season is upon us. The CDC’s big marketing claim about the flu vaccine emphasizes repeatedly that “36,000 Americans die of flu each year.” But is this true? A 2005 study from the British Medical Journal debunks this figure by revealing two things: first, the number is not based in counting actual deaths. It comes from a statistical model which only estimates mortality but doesn’t actually track it. Second, if anyone questions this large mortality, the CDC inflates the numbers by combining deaths from flu and pneumonia as though they were all flu deaths. Actually, the annual deaths from pneumonia unrelated to flu are far greater than those from flu.1