The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
The CDC is celebrating its annual Influenza Vaccination Week which runs from December 4th through the 10th.1 There will be a media onslaught as they try to persuade us that we will be in dire straights if we don’t get the flu vaccine. All of the regulatory bodies and the opinion leaders, the CDC, the FDA, the Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, the AMA, the American Academy of Pediatrics and all the health care providers would have us believe that flu is a serious illness that can only be prevented by annual vaccination of everyone from 6 months of age on up. They try to persuade us by showing celebrities like Anderson Cooper getting a vaccine on coast-to-coast TV under the watchful gaze of Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Or they try to instill us with fear: flu is unpredictable, it can be severe, it can kill -- and there might not be enough vaccine for everyone! What if there is a pandemic? Should we be worried? Should we get the vaccine to protect our friends and loved ones? Maybe not. Let’s take a look at some of the facts the CDC would rather you didn’t know.
Is It Really Dangerous Not to Get the Flu Vaccine?
The CDC’s website used to state that 36,000 Americans die of flu each year, but this number was always seriously exaggerated. First, the CDC inflated the numbers by lumping together deaths from flu and pneumonia as though they were the same thing when actually, the annual deaths from pneumonia not caused by flu have always been far greater than those from flu. More significantly, this number was never based on recorded deaths. It came instead from a statistical model which only estimates mortality but doesn’t actually count fatalities.2 This year, however, the CDC’s website reflects the criticism they have received about this overstatement. In an impressive downward revision, the CDC now states that “over a period of 30 years, between 1976 and 2006, estimates of flu-associated deaths in the United States range from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people.”3 Quite a difference! For 2007, the CDC’s own statistics show that the number of deaths actually caused by influenza was just 411, and the death rate was therefore only 1 out of 1,000,000 people.4
Return to Article