Ten questions about flu vaccines that doctors and health authorities refuse to answer

Here are ten questions vaccine-pushing doctors and health authorities absolutely refuse to answer:

#1) Where are the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies proving flu vaccines are both safe and effective?

Answer: There aren't any. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027239_v...)


#2) Where, then, is the so-called "science" backing the idea that flu vaccines work at all?

Answer: Other than "cohort studies," there isn't any. And the cohort studies have been thoroughly debunked. Scientifically speaking, there isn't a scrap of honest evidence showing flu vaccines work at all.


#3) How can methyl mercury (Thimerosal, a preservative used in flu vaccines) be safe for injecting into the human body when mercury is an extremely toxic heavy metal?

Answer: It isn't safe at all. Methyl mercury is a poison. Along with vaccine adjuvants, it explains why so many people suffer autism or other debilitating neurological side effects after being vaccinated.


#4) Why do reports keep surfacing of children and teens suffering debilitating neurological disorders, brain swelling, seizures and even death following flu vaccines or HPV vaccines?

Answer: Because vaccines are dangerous. The vaccine industry routinely dismisses all such accounts -- no matter how many are reported -- as "coincidence."


#5) Why don't doctors recommend vitamin D for flu protection, especially when vitamin D activates the immune response far better than a vaccine? (http://www.naturalnews.com/027231_V...)

Answer: Because vitamin D can't be patented and sold as "medicine." You can make it yourself. If you want more vitamin D, you don't even need a doctor, and doctors tend not to recommend things that put them out of business.


#6) If human beings need flu vaccines to survive, then how did humans survive through all of Earth's history?

Answer: Human genetic code is already wired to automatically defend you against invading microorganisms (as long as you have vitamin D). (http://www.naturalnews.com/027231_V...)


#7) If the flu vaccine offers protection against the flu, then why are the people who often catch the flu the very same people who were vaccinated against it?

Answer: Because those most vulnerable to influenza infections are the very same people who have a poor adaptive response to the vaccines and don't build antibodies. In other words flu vaccines only "work" on people who don't need them. (And even building antibodies doesn't equate to real-world protection from the flu, by the way.)


#8) If the flu vaccine really works, then why was there no huge increase in flu death rates in 2004, the year when flu vaccines were in short supply and vaccination rates dropped by 40%? (http://www.naturalnews.com/027239_v...)

Answer: There was no change in the death rate. You could drop vaccination rates to zero percent and you'd still see no change in the number of people dying from the flu. That's because flu vaccines simply don't work.


#9) How can flu vaccines reduce mortality by 50% (as is claimed) when only about 10% of winter deaths are related to the flu in the first place?

They can't. The 50% statistic is an example of quack medical marketing. If I have a room full of 100 people, then I take the 50 healthiest people and hand them a candy bar, I can't then scientifically claim that "candy bars make people healthy." That's essentially the same logic behind the "50% reduction in mortality" claim of flu vaccines. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027239_v...).


#10) If flu vaccines work so well, then why are drug makers and health authorities so reluctant to subject them to scientific scrutiny with randomized, placebo-controlled studies?

Answer: Although they claim such studies would be "unethical," what's far more unethical is to keep injecting hundreds of millions of people every year with useless, harmful vaccines that aren't backed by a shred of honest evidence.

Vaccine voodoo?
The vaccine industry is about making money, not actually offering immune protection against the flu. Whether people get the flu or not is irrelevant to the bottom-line profits of the drug companies. What matters most is that people continue to take the flu shots, and making that happen depends entirely on pushing the vaccine mythology that infects the minds of doctors and health authorities today.

There was a time when all "good" doctors believed in bloodletting. Sickness was caused by evil spirits, they thought, and releasing pints of blood from the patient would clear the evil spirits and accelerate healing. Any doctor who questioned the science behind bloodletting was called a "denier." All the "good" doctors said, "We know bloodletting works, so we don't need science to back it up."

Today, you hear the exact same thing about vaccines. "We know they work," doctors claim, "so we don't need any real science to back it up." Anyone who questions the safety of flu vaccines (or H1N1 vaccines) is branded a "denier." Anyone who asks for solid scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of vaccines is called a troublemaker. They don't need any evidence. They already know vaccines work.

With that being the case, why bother calling it medicine at all? Why not just call it VOODOO? Why not accompany vaccines with the wave of a magic wand and some shamanic chanting? Maybe doctors should tell their patients to cross their fingers before being injected with a vaccine because "that makes it work better."

Seriously. Everything that doctors accuse "quacks" of doing with homeopathy, or herbs, or energy medicine is now being done by the doctors themselves when it comes to vaccines. They are following the exact same "quackery" they accuse other of pursuing.

This brings me to an important observation about modern medicine: MY quackery is okay, but YOUR quackery isn't!

That's the attitude of vaccine-pushing doctors and health authorities. As long as the quackery is widely agreed upon by the medical masses, then to heck with actual scientific evidence.

Quackery only needs good company, not good science, to be accepted as true.

Why natural medicine is inherently safer
Of course, these vaccine devotees might say, well, you don't have any good evidence to support your anti-viral herbs, or your medicinal teas, or your vitamin D nutrition either. But in saying that, they miss the whole point: Foods, herbs and nutrition are all natural, biocompatible healing elements that have been part of the human experience for as long as humans have roamed this planet. A chemical injection with a sharp needle that pierces the skin, on the other hand, is extremely interventionist. It's unnatural and in many ways quite radical. As such, it demands a higher burden of scientific proof than something that human beings have evolved with over time.

Foods, herbs and natural medicines have been around for millions of years. Vaccines have existed for less than a hundred years, and routine season flu vaccinations have really only been pushed hard for less than twenty years. They have no track record of success. They aren't natural, they aren't compatible with human biology, and they contain extremely toxic substances that clearly do not belong in the human body.

Given such extremes, the burden of proof for both safety and efficacy of vaccines falls onto those who would advocate them. And yet, to this day, no such proof has been offered... or is even pursued. There isn't even a plan in place to someday find out if flu vaccines really work. The whole plan is to just pursue "business as usual" and keep injecting people whether it really works or not.

Vaccine needles would be far more honest if they were shaped like question marks.

Flu vaccines are the voodoo of modern medicine.

Seriously. You would have the same level of protection from the flu if you brought your own personal voodoo doll to the clinic and had them inject that with the vaccine instead of you!

That's an interesting idea, actually. We could really reduce national health care costs if we just administered western medicines to our voodoo dolls instead of our actual bodies. Got cancer? Just poison your voodoo doll with chemotherapy. Side effects are almost non-existent. Need heart bypass surgery? Just have them operate on the doll (it's far less complicated). Want some protection from the winter flu? Just vaccinate the doll. It's quick and painless.

The results would be no worse than what people are experiencing right now. In fact, in most cases they might actually be better.

Does the Vaccine Matter?

Whether this season’s swine flu turns out to be deadly or mild, most experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before we’re hit by a truly devastating flu pandemic—one that might kill more people worldwide than have died of the plague and aids combined. In the U.S., the main lines of defense are pharmaceutical—vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread of flu and prevent people from dying from it. Yet now some flu experts are challenging the medical orthodoxy and arguing that for those most in need of protection, flu shots and antiviral drugs may provide little to none. So where does that leave us if a bad pandemic strikes?

by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer


Drive too fast along Red Lion Road, beside Philadelphia’s Northeast Airport, and you will miss the low-rise cement building where the biotech company MedImmune has been quietly pumping out swine flu vaccine at about a million doses a week. Through the summer and fall, workers wearing protective gear that covered them from head to toe brewed up batches of live, genetically modified flu virus. Robots then injected tiny doses of virus-laden fluid into glass vials, which were mounted into nasal spritzers, labeled, and readied for shipment at the direction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, which is helping to coordinate the nation’s pandemic-preparedness plan. In the most ambitious vaccination program the nation has mounted since the anti-polio campaign in the 1950s, the federal government has commissioned MedImmune and four other companies to produce enough vaccine to cover the entire U.S. population.

Vaccination is central to the government’s plan for preventing deaths from swine flu. The CDC has recommended that some 159 million adults and children receive either a swine flu shot or a dose of MedImmune’s nasal vaccine this year. Shots are offered in doctors’ offices, hospitals, airports, pharmacies, schools, polling places, shopping malls, and big-box stores like Wal-Mart. In August, New York state required all health-care workers to get both seasonal and swine flu shots. To further protect the populace, the federal government has spent upwards of $3billion stockpiling millions of doses of antiviral drugs like Tamiflu—which are being used both to prevent swine flu and to treat those who fall ill.

Also see:
Q&A: “Facts About Swine Flu”
The authors answer practical questions about H1N1 diagnosis and immunity.

But what if everything we think we know about fighting influenza is wrong? What if flu vaccines do not protect people from dying—particularly the elderly, who account for 90 percent of deaths from seasonal flu? And what if the expensive antiviral drugs that the government has stockpiled over the past few years also have little, if any, power to reduce the number of people who die or are hospitalized? The U.S. government—with the support of leaders in the public-health and medical communities—has put its faith in the power of vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread and lethality of swine flu. Other plans to contain the pandemic seem anemic by comparison. Yet some top flu researchers are deeply skeptical of both flu vaccines and antivirals. Like the engineers who warned for years about the levees of New Orleans, these experts caution that our defenses may be flawed, and quite possibly useless against a truly lethal flu. And that unless we are willing to ask fundamental questions about the science behind flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, we could find ourselves, in a bad epidemic, as helpless as the citizens of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

The term influenza, which dates back to the Middle Ages, is taken from the Italian word for occult or astral influence. Then as now, flu seemed to appear out of nowhere each winter, debilitating or killing large numbers of people, only to vanish in the spring. Today, seasonal flu is estimated to kill about 36,000 people in the United States each year, and half a million worldwide.

Yet the flu, in many important respects, remains mysterious. Determining how many deaths it really causes, or even who has it, is no simple matter. We think we have the flu anytime we fall ill with an ailment that brings on headache, malaise, fever, coughing, sneezing, and that achy feeling as if we’ve been sleeping on a bed of rocks, but researchers have found that at most half, and perhaps as few as 7 or 8 percent, of such cases are actually caused by an influenza virus in any given year. More than 200 known viruses and other pathogens can cause the suite of symptoms known as “influenza-like illness”; respiratory syncytial virus, bocavirus, coronavirus, and rhinovirus are just a few of the bugs that can make a person feel rotten. And depending on the season, in up to two-thirds of the cases of flu-like illness, no cause at all can be found.

Nobody knows precisely why we are much more likely to catch the flu in the winter months than at other times of the year. Perhaps it’s because flu viruses flourish in cool temperatures and are killed by exposure to sunlight. Or maybe it’s because in winter, people spend more time indoors, where a sneeze or a cough can more easily spread a virus to others. What is certain is that influenza viruses mutate with amazing speed, so each flu season sees slightly different genetic versions of the viruses that infected people the year before. Every year, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collect data from 94 nations on the flu viruses that circulated the previous year, and then make an educated guess about which viruses are likely to circulate in the coming fall. Based on that information, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issues orders to manufacturers in February for a vaccine that includes the three most likely strains.

Every once in a while, however, a very different bug pops up and infects far more people than the normal seasonal flu variants do. It is these novel viruses that are responsible for pandemics, defined by the World Health Organization as events that occur when “a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity” and which can sweep around the world in a very short time. The worst flu pandemic in recorded history was the “Spanish flu” of 1918–19, at the end of World WarI. A third of the world’s population was infected, with at least 40million and perhaps as many as 100million people dying—more than were killed in World Wars I and II combined. (Some scholars suggest that one reason World WarI ended was that so many soldiers were sick or dying from flu.) Since then, two other flu pandemics have occurred, in 1957 and 1968, neither of which was particularly lethal.

In August, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology projected that this fall and winter, the swine flu, H1N1, could infect anywhere between one-third and one-half of the U.S. population and could kill as many as 90,000 Americans, two and a half times the number killed in a typical flu season. But precisely how deadly, or even how infectious, this year’s H1N1 pandemic will turn out to be won’t be known until it’s over. Most reports coming from the Southern Hemisphere in late August (the end of winter there) suggested that the swine flu is highly infectious, but not particularly lethal. For example, Australian officials estimated they would finish winter with under 1,000 swine flu deaths—fewer than the usual 1,500 to 3,000 from seasonal flu. Among those who have died in the U.S., about 70 percent were already suffering from congenital conditions like cerebral palsy or underlying illnesses such as cancer, asthma, or AIDS, which make people more vulnerable.

Public-health officials consider vaccine their most formidable defense against the pandemic—indeed, against any flu—and on the surface, their faith seems justified. Vaccines developed over the course of the 20th century slashed the death rates of nearly a dozen infectious diseases, such as smallpox and polio, and vaccination became one of medicine’s most potent weapons. Influenza virus was first identified in the 1930s, and by the mid-1940s, researchers had produced a vaccine that was given to soldiers in World WarII. The U.S. government got serious about promoting flu vaccine after the 1957 flu pandemic brought home influenza’s continuing potential to cause widespread illness and death. Today, flu vaccine is a staple of public-health policy; in a normal year, some 100 million Americans get vaccinated.

But while vaccines for, say, whooping cough and polio clearly and dramatically reduced death rates from those diseases, the impact of flu vaccine has been harder to determine. Flu comes and goes with the seasons, and often it does not kill people directly, but rather contributes to death by making the body more susceptible to secondary infections like pneumonia or bronchitis. For this reason, researchers studying the impact of flu vaccination typically look at deaths from all causes during flu season, and compare the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.

Such comparisons have shown a dramatic difference in mortality between these two groups: study after study has found that people who get a flu shot in the fall are about half as likely to die that winter—from any cause—as people who do not. Get your flu shot each year, the literature suggests, and you will dramatically reduce your chance of dying during flu season.

Yet in the view of several vaccine skeptics, this claim is suspicious on its face. Influenza causes only a small minority of all deaths in the U.S., even among senior citizens, and even after adding in the deaths to which flu might have contributed indirectly. When researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases included all deaths from illnesses that flu aggravates, like lung disease or chronic heart failure, they found that flu accounts for, at most, 10 percent of winter deaths among the elderly. So how could flu vaccine possibly reduce total deaths by half? Tom Jefferson, a physician based in Rome and the head of the Vaccines Field at the Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected international network of researchers who appraise medical evidence, says: “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.”

The estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction is based on “cohort studies,” which compare death rates in large groups, or cohorts, of people who choose to be vaccinated, against death rates in groups who don’t. But people who choose to be vaccinated may differ in many important respects from people who go unvaccinated—and those differences can influence the chance of death during flu season. Education, lifestyle, income, and many other “confounding” factors can come into play, and as a result, cohort studies are notoriously prone to bias. When researchers crunch the numbers, they typically try to factor out variables that could bias the results, but, as Jefferson remarks, “you can adjust for the confounders you know about, not for the ones you don’t,” and researchers can’t always anticipate what factors are likely to be important to whether a patient dies from flu. There is always the chance that they might miss some critical confounder that renders their results entirely wrong.

When Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the response she got sounded more like doctrine than science. “People told me, ‘No good can come of [asking] this,’” she says. “‘Potentially a lot of bad could happen’ for me professionally by raising any criticism that might dissuade people from getting vaccinated, because of course, ‘We know that vaccine works.’ This was the prevailing wisdom.”

Nonetheless, in 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the “healthy user effect.” They hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term. People who don’t get vaccinated may be bedridden or otherwise too sick to go get a shot. They may also be more likely to succumb to flu or any other illness, because they are generally older and sicker. To test their thesis, Jackson and her colleagues combed through eight years of medical data on more than 72,000 people 65 and older. They looked at who got flu shots and who didn’t. Then they examined which group’s members were more likely to die of any cause when it was not flu season.

Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”

The results were also so unexpected that many experts simply refused to believe them. Jackson’s papers were turned down for publication in the top-ranked medical journals. One flu expert who reviewed her studies for the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, “To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!” When the papers were finally published in 2006, in the less prominent International Journal of Epidemiology, they were largely ignored by doctors and public-health officials. “The answer I got,” says Jackson, “was not the right answer.”

The history of flu vaccination suggests other reasons to doubt claims that it dramatically reduces mortality. In 2004, for example, vaccine production fell behind, causing a 40 percent drop in immunization rates. Yet mortality did not rise. In addition, vaccine “mismatches” occurred in 1968 and 1997: in both years, the vaccine that had been produced in the summer protected against one set of viruses, but come winter, a different set was circulating. In effect, nobody was vaccinated. Yet death rates from all causes, including flu and the various illnesses it can exacerbate, did not budge. Sumit Majumdar, a physician and researcher at the University of Alberta, in Canada, offers another historical observation: rising rates of vaccination of the elderly over the past two decades have not coincided with a lower overall mortality rate. In 1989, only 15 percent of people over age 65 in the U.S. and Canada were vaccinated against flu. Today, more than 65 percent are immunized. Yet death rates among the elderly during flu season have increased rather than decreased.

Vaccine proponents call Majumdar’s last observation an “ecological fallacy,” because he fails, in their view, to consider changes in the larger environment that could have boosted death rates over the years—even as rising vaccination rates were doing their part to keep mortality in check. The proponents suggest, for instance, that influenza viruses may have become more contagious over time, and thus are infecting greater numbers of elderly people, including some who have been vaccinated. Or maybe the viruses are becoming more lethal. Or maybe the elderly have less immunity to flu than they once did because, say, their diets have changed.

Or maybe vaccine just doesn’t prevent deaths in the elderly. Of course, that’s the one possibility that vaccine adherents won’t consider. Nancy Cox, the CDC’s influenza division chief, says flatly, “The flu vaccine is the best way to protect against flu.” Anthony Fauci, a physician and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, where much of the basic science of flu vaccine has been worked out, says, “I have no doubt that it is effective in conferring some degree of protection. To say otherwise is a minority view.”

Majumdar says, “We keep coming up against the belief that we’ve reduced mortality by 50 percent,” and when researchers poke holes in the evidence, “people pound the pulpit.”

The most vocal—and undoubtedly most vexing—critic of the gospel of flu vaccine is the Cochrane Collaboration’s Jefferson, who’s also an epidemiologist trained at the famed London School of Tropical Hygiene, and who, in Lisa Jackson’s view, makes other skeptics seem “moderate by comparison.” Among his fellow flu researchers, Jefferson’s outspokenness has made him something of a pariah. At a 2007 meeting on pandemic preparedness at a hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, Jefferson, who’d been invited to speak at the conference, was not greeted by any of the colleagues milling about the lobby. He ate his meals in the hotel restaurant alone, surrounded by scientists chatting amiably at other tables. He shrugs off such treatment. As a medical officer working for the United Nations in 1992, during the siege of Sarajevo, he and other peacekeepers were captured and held for more than a month by militiamen brandishing AK-47s and reeking of alcohol. Professional shunning seems trivial by comparison, he says.

“Tom Jefferson has taken a lot of heat just for saying, ‘Here’s the evidence: it’s not very good,’” says Majumdar. “The reaction has been so dogmatic and even hysterical that you’d think he was advocating stealing babies.” Yet while other flu researchers may not like what Jefferson has to say, they cannot ignore the fact that he knows the flu-vaccine literature better than anyone else on the planet. He leads an international team of researchers who have combed through hundreds of flu-vaccine studies. The vast majority of the studies were deeply flawed, says Jefferson. “Rubbish is not a scientific term, but I think it’s the term that applies.” Only four studies were properly designed to pin down the effectiveness of flu vaccine, he says, and two of those showed that it might be effective in certain groups of patients, such as school-age children with no underlying health issues like asthma. The other two showed equivocal results or no benefit.

Flu researchers have been fooled into thinking vaccine is more effective than the data suggest, in part, says Jefferson, by the imprecision of the statistics. The only way to know if someone has the flu—as opposed to influenza-like illness—is by putting a Q-tip into the patient’s throat or nose and running a test, which simply isn’t done that often. Likewise, nobody really has a handle on how many of the deaths that are blamed on flu were actually caused by a flu virus, because few are confirmed by a laboratory. “I used to be a family physician,” says Jefferson. “I’ve never seen a patient come to my office with H1N1 written on his forehead. When an old person dies of respiratory failure after an influenza-like illness, they nearly always get coded as influenza.”

There’s one other way flu researchers may be fooled into thinking flu vaccine is effective, Jefferson says. All vaccines work by delivering a dose of killed or weakened virus or bacteria, which provokes the immune system into producing antibodies. When the person is subsequently exposed to the real thing, the body is already prepared to repel the bug completely or to get rid of it after a mild illness. Flu researchers often use antibody response as a way of gauging the effectiveness of vaccine, on the assumption that levels of antibodies in the blood of people who have been vaccinated are a good predictor—although an imperfect one—of how well they can ward off the infection.

There’s some merit to this reasoning. Unfortunately, the very people who most need protection from the flu also have immune systems that are least likely to respond to vaccine. Studies show that young, healthy people mount a glorious immune response to seasonal flu vaccine, and their response reduces their chances of getting the flu and may lessen the severity of symptoms if they do get it. But they aren’t the people who die from seasonal flu. By contrast, the elderly, particularly those over age70, don’t have a good immune response to vaccine—and they’re the ones who account for most flu deaths. (Infants with severe disabilities, such as leukemia and congenital lung disease, and people who are immune-compromised—from AIDS, or diabetes, or cancer treatment—make up the rest. As of August8, only 36 deaths from swine flu had been confirmed among children in the U.S., and the overwhelming majority of those children had multiple, severe health disorders.)

In Jefferson’s view, this raises a troubling conundrum: Is vaccine necessary for those in whom it is effective, namely the young and healthy? Conversely, is it effective in those for whom it seems to be necessary, namely the old, the very young, and the infirm? These questions have led to the most controversial aspect of Jefferson’s work: his call for placebo-controlled trials, studies that would randomly give half the test subjects vaccine and the other half a dummy shot, or placebo. Only such large, well-constructed, randomized trials can show with any precision how effective vaccine really is, and for whom.

In the flu-vaccine world, Jefferson’s call for placebo-controlled studies is considered so radical that even some of his fellow skeptics oppose it. Majumdar, the Ottawa researcher, says he believes that evidence of a benefit among children is established and that public-health officials should try to protect seniors by immunizing children, health-care workers, and other people around them, and thus reduce the spread of the flu. Lone Simonsen explains the prevailing view: “It is considered unethical to do trials in populations that are recommended to have vaccine,” a stance that is shared by everybody from the CDC’s Nancy Cox to Anthony Fauci at the NIH. They feel strongly that vaccine has been shown to be effective and that a sham vaccine would put test subjects at unnecessary risk of getting a serious case of the flu. In a phone interview, Fauci at first voiced the opinion that a placebo trial in the elderly might be acceptable, but he called back later to retract his comment, saying that such a trial “would be unethical.” Jefferson finds this view almost exactly backward: “What do you do when you have uncertainty? You test,” he says. “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.”

Just after 6 p.m. on a warm Friday evening in July, Dr. David Newman is only minutes into a 10-hour shift in the emergency room of New York City’s St. Luke’s Hospital, and already he has assumed responsibility for 11 patients. The young Italian tourist sitting on the bed in front of the doctor has meningitis, and through an interpreter, Newman tells him he almost certainly has the viral form of the disease, which will do nothing more than make him feel ill for a few days. There is a tiny chance, says Newman, that the illness is caused by a bacterium, which can be deadly, but he is almost positive that’s not what the tourist has. He says to his patient, “I can’t tell you with 100 percent certainty that you don’t have it, but if you do, you’ll begin to feel worse and you’ll need to come back.” The tourist, on learning that he might be infected with a potentially lethal disease, looks down at his feet and confesses that he is much more worried about another illness: swine flu. Newman smiles patiently. “It would be nice if you had swine flu,” he says. “Compared to bacterial meningitis, swine flu is safe.”

Late last spring, as headlines and airwaves warned of a possible pandemic, patients like Newman’s began clogging emergency rooms across the country, a sneezing, coughing, infectious tide of humanity more worried than truly sick, but whose mere presence in the emergency room has endangered the lives of others. “Studies show that when there is ER crowding, mortality goes up, because patients who need immediate attention don’t get it,” says Newman, the director of clinical research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the hospital, which is affiliated with Columbia University. In an average year the ER at St. Luke’s, a sprawling 1,076-bed hospital on 113th Street, takes in 110,000 patients, some 300 a day. At the height of the summer swine flu outbreak, that number doubled. The vast majority of panicky patients who came in the door at St. Luke’s and other emergency departments didn’t actually have the virus, and of those who did, most were not sick enough to need hospitalization. Even so, says Newman, when patients with even mild flu symptoms show up in the hospital, they vastly increase the spread of the virus, simply because they inevitably sneeze and cough in rooms that are jammed with other people.

Many of the worried sick come to St. Luke’s and other hospitals in search of antiviral drugs. The CDC recommends the use of two drugs against H1N1: oseltamivir and zanamivir, better known by their brand names, Tamiflu and Relenza, which together form the second pillar of the government’s anti-pandemic-flu strategy. Public-health officials at the state and local levels are also recommending the drugs. Guidelines issued by the New York City Department of Health, says Newman, “encourage us to give a prescription to just about every patient with the sniffles,” a practice that some experts worry will quickly lead to resistant strains of the virus.

Indeed, that’s already happening. Daniel Janies, an associate professor of biomedical informatics at Ohio State University, tracks the genetic mutations that allow flu virus to develop resistance to drugs. Flu can become resistant to Tamiflu in a matter of days, he says. Handing out the drug early in the pandemic, when H1N1 poses only a minimal threat to the vast majority of patients, strikes him as “shortsighted.” Indeed, samples of resistant H1N1 were cropping up by midsummer, increasing the likelihood that come late fall, many people will be infected with a resistant strain of swine flu. Alarmed at that prospect, the World Health Organization issued an alert on August 21, recommending that Tamiflu and Relenza be used only in severe cases and in patients who are at high risk of serious complications. By mid-August, two U.S. swine flu patients had developed Tamiflu-resistant strains.

The U.S. first began stockpiling Tamiflu and Relenza back in 2005, in the wake of concern that an outbreak in Southeast Asia of bird flu, a far more deadly form of the disease, might go global. On November 1, 2005, President George W.Bush pronounced pandemic flu a “danger to our homeland,” and he asked Congress to approve legislation that included $1billion for the production and stockpiling of antivirals. This was after Congress had already approved $1.8billion to stockpile Tamiflu for the military, a decision that was made during the tenure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (Before joining the Bush Cabinet, Rumsfeld was chairman for four years of Gilead Sciences, the company that holds the patent on Tamiflu, and he held millions of dollars’ worth of stock in the company. According to Roll Call, an online newspaper covering events on Capitol Hill, Rumsfeld says he recused himself from all government decisions involving Tamiflu. Gilead’s stock price rose more than 50 percent in 2005, when the government’s plan was announced.)

As with vaccines, the scientific evidence for Tamiflu and Relenza is thin at best. In its general-information section, the CDC’s Web site tells readers that antiviral drugs can “make you feel better faster.” True, but not by much. On average, Tamiflu (which accounts for 85 to 90 percent of the flu antiviral-drug market) cuts the duration of flu symptoms by 24hours in otherwise healthy people. In exchange for a slightly shorter bout of illness, as many as one in five people taking Tamiflu will experience nausea and vomiting. About one in five children will have neuropsychiatric side effects, possibly including anxiety and suicidal behavior. In Japan, where Tamiflu is liberally prescribed, the drug may have been responsible for 50 deaths from cardiopulmonary arrest, from 2001 to 2007, according to Rokuro Hama, the chair of the Japan Institute of Pharmacovigilance.

Such side effects might be worth risking if the antivirals prevented serious complications of flu, such as pneumonia, hospitalization, and death. Roche Laboratories, the company licensed to manufacture and market Tamiflu, says its drug does just that. In two September2006 press releases, the company announced, “Tamiflu significantly reduces the risk of death from influenza: New data shows treatment was associated with more than a two third reduction in deaths,” and “Children with influenza [are] 53 percent less likely to contract pneumonia when treated with Tamiflu.” Once again cohort studies (the same kind of potentially biased research that led to the conclusion that flu vaccine cuts mortality by 50 percent) are behind these claims. Tamiflu costs $10 a pill. It is possible that people who take it are more likely to be insured and affluent, or at least middle-class, than those who do not, and a large body of evidence shows that the well-off nearly always fare better than the poor when stricken with an infectious disease, including flu. In both 2003 and 2009, reviews of randomized placebo-controlled studies found that the study populations simply weren’t large enough to answer the question: Does Tamiflu prevent pneumonia?

As late as this August, the company’s own Web site contained the following statement, which was written under the direction of the FDA: “Tamiflu has not been proven to have a positive impact on the potential consequences (such as hospitalizations, mortality, or economic impact) of seasonal, avian, or pandemic influenza.” An FDA spokesperson said recently that the agency is unaware of any data submitted by Roche that would support the claims in the company’s September 2006 news release about the drug’s reducing flu deaths.

Why, then, has the federal government stockpiled millions of doses of antivirals, at a cost of several billion dollars? And why are physicians being encouraged to hand out prescriptions to large numbers of people, without sound evidence that the drugs will help? The short answer may be that public-health officials feel they must offer something, and these drugs are the only possible remedies at hand. “I have to agree with the critics the antiviral question is not cut-and-dried,” says Fauci. “But [these drugs are] the best we have.” The CDC’s Nancy Cox also acknowledges that the science is not as sound as she might like, but the government still recommends their use. And as with vaccines, she considers additional randomized placebo-controlled trials of the antiviral drugs to be “unethical” and thus out of the question.

This is the curious state of debate about the government’s two main weapons in the fight against pandemic flu. At first, government officials declare that both vaccines and drugs are effective. When faced with contrary evidence, the adherents acknowledge that the science is not as crisp as they might wish. Then, in response to calls for placebo-controlled trials, which would provide clear results one way or the other, the proponents say such studies would deprive patients of vaccines and drugs that have already been deemed effective. “We can’t just let people die,” says Cox.

Students of U.S. medical history will find this circular logic familiar: it is a long-recurring theme in American medicine, and one that has, on occasion, had deadly consequences. In 1925, Sinclair Lewis caricatured a medical culture that allowed belief—and profits—to distort science in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Arrowsmith. Based on the lives of the real-life microbiologists Paul de Kruif and Jacques Loeb, Lewis tells the story of Martin Arrowsmith, a physician who invents a new vaccine during a deadly outbreak of bubonic plague. But his efforts to test the vaccine’s efficacy are frustrated by an angry community that desperately wants to believe the vaccine works, and a profit-hungry institute that rushes the vaccine into use prematurely—forever preempting the proper studies that are needed.

The annals of medicine are littered with treatments and tests that became medical doctrine on the slimmest of evidence, and were then declared sacrosanct and beyond scientific investigation. In the 1980s and ’90s, for example, cancer specialists were convinced that high-dose chemotherapy followed by a bone-marrow transplant was the best hope for women with advanced breast cancer, and many refused to enroll their patients in randomized clinical trials that were designed to test transplants against the standard—and far less toxic—therapy. The trials, they said, were unethical, because they knew transplants worked. When the studies were concluded, in 1999 and 2000, it turned out that bone-marrow transplants were killing patients. Another recent example involves drugs related to the analgesic lidocaine. In the 1970s, doctors noticed that the drugs seemed to make the heart beat rhythmically, and they began prescribing them to patients suffering from irregular heartbeats, assuming that restoring a proper rhythm would reduce the patient’s risk of dying. Prominent cardiologists for years opposed clinical trials of the drugs, saying it would be medical malpractice to withhold them from patients in a control group. The drugs were widely used for two decades, until a government-sponsored study showed in 1989 that patients who were prescribed the medicine were three and a half times as likely to die as those given a placebo.

Demonstrating the efficacy (or lack thereof) of vaccine and antivirals during flu season would not be hard to do, given the proper resources. Take a group of people who are at risk of getting the flu, and randomly assign half to get vaccine and the other half a dummy shot. Then count the people in each group who come down with flu, suffer serious illness, or die. (A similarly designed trial would suffice for the antivirals.) It might sound coldhearted, but it is the only way to know for certain whether, and for whom, current remedies actually work. It would also be useful to know whether vaccinating healthy people—who can mount an immune response on their own—protects the more vulnerable people around them. For example, immunizing nursing-home staff and healthy children is thought to reduce the spread of flu to the elderly and the immune-compromised. Pinning down the effectiveness of this strategy would be a bit more complex, but not impossible.

In the absence of such evidence, we are left with two possibilities. One is that flu vaccine is in fact highly beneficial, or at least helpful. Solid evidence to that effect would encourage more citizens—and particularly more health professionals—to get their shots and prevent the flu’s spread. As it stands, more than 50 percent of health-care workers say they do not intend to get vaccinated for swine flu and don’t routinely get their shots for seasonal flu, in part because many of them doubt the vaccines’ efficacy. The other possibility, of course, is that we’re relying heavily on vaccines and antivirals that simply don’t work, or don’t work as well as we believe. And as a result, we may be neglecting other, proven measures that could minimize the death rate during pandemics.

“Vaccines give us a false sense of security,” says Sumit Majumdar. “When you have a strategy that [everybody thinks] reduces death by 50 percent, it’s pretty hard to invest resources to come up with better remedies.” For instance, health departments in every state are responsible for submitting plans to the CDC for educating the public, in the event of a serious pandemic, about hand-washing and “social distancing” (voluntary quarantines, school closings, and even enforcement of mandatory quarantines to keep infected people in their homes). Putting these plans into action will require considerable coordination among government officials, the media, and health-care workers—and widespread buy-in from the public. Yet little discussion has appeared in the press to help people understand the measures they can take to best protect themselves during a flu outbreak—other than vaccination and antivirals.

“Launched early enough and continued long enough, social distancing can blunt the impact of a pandemic,” says Howard Markel, a pediatrician and historian of medicine at the University of Michigan. Washing hands diligently, avoiding public places during an outbreak, and having a supply of canned goods and water on hand are sound defenses, he says. Such steps could be highly effective in helping to slow the spread of the virus. In Mexico, for instance, where the first swine flu cases were identified in March, the government launched an aggressive program to get people to wash their hands and exhorted those who were sick to stay home and effectively quarantine themselves. In the United Kingdom, the national health department is promoting a “buddy” program, encouraging citizens to find a friend or neighbor willing to deliver food and medicine so people who fall ill can stay home.

In the U.S., by contrast, our reliance on vaccination may have the opposite effect: breeding feelings of invulnerability, and leading some people to ignore simple measures like better-than-normal hygiene, staying away from those who are sick, and staying home when they feel ill. Likewise, our encouragement of early treatment with antiviral drugs will likely lead many people to show up at the hospital at first sniffle. “There’s no worse place to go than the hospital during flu season,” says Majumdar. Those who don’t have the flu are more likely to catch it there, and those who do will spread it around, he says. “But we don’t tell people this.”

All of which leaves open the question of what people should do when faced with a decision about whether to get themselves and their families vaccinated. There is little immediate danger from getting a seasonal flu shot, aside from a sore arm and mild flu-like symptoms. The safety of the swine flu vaccine remains to be seen. In the absence of better evidence, vaccines and antivirals must be viewed as only partial and uncertain defenses against the flu. And they may be mere talismans. By being afraid to do the proper studies now, we may be condemning ourselves to using treatments based on illusion and faith rather than sound science.

Humanity's Greatest Challenge - Fear or Love

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Doctors Concerned FluMist Vaccine Could Spread Live H1N1 Virus

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This Documentary is about the origin of Planned parent hood & its goal in the eradication of the black population of the earth. After the emancipation of slavery in the USA. It show undeniable proof of government involvement funding from the rich elite that exists till this day in corporate America. This vid will show planned Parenthood's true agenda in "Population Control

Ineffectiveness And Dangers Of Flu Shots

By Stephen Lendman
10-5-9


Believing what governments say can be hazardous to your health. It's even truer from corporate-sponsored studies on the benefits of their products. Thus, be very leery about the new CSL Ltd. one on the effectiveness of taking one Swine Flu dose. More to the point, any Swine Flu shot as, in single or multiple doses, they're all extremely toxic, dangerous, and must be avoided to protect human health from the pathogenic onslaught vaccines are designed to unleash.

CSL is "Australia's leading biopharmaceutical company (and) the only commercial manufacturer of influenza vaccines in the Southern Hemisphere." It's currently producing "a pandemic influenza vaccine called Panvax H1N1 which uses the proven technology that has enabled us to provide Australia with seasonal flu vaccines over the last 40 years."

The New England Journal of Medicine published "the welcome news," claiming to show one shot produced the same immune response protection as annual flu vaccines. More on their ineffectiveness and hidden dangers below.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (part of the US National Institutes of Health) also claims its early trials and studies confirm one dose provides protection eight to ten days after inoculation. Again beware - their advice endangers your health, especially about Swine Flu and the vaccines designed for it. They advise everyone take them voluntarily. Later, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius may mandate them if enough people don't comply, and individual states may follow suit.

Separating Facts from Government and Industry Disinformation

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), annual flu shots are advised for "all children from 6 months through 18 years of age," everyone over 50, pregnant women, and individuals with "long-term health problems" like heart, lung, kidney or liver disease, HIV/AIDS, other immune system diseases or persons with weakened immune systems, asthma, diabetes, anemia, certain muscle or nerve disorders, residents of nursing homes or chronic care facilities, and certain others.

Warning about "seasonal epidemics," the World Health Organization's (WHO) advice is much the same, adding that "Seasonal influenza spreads easily and can sweep through schools, nursing homes or businesses and towns....The most effective way to prevent the disease or severe outcomes from the illness is vaccination."
The WHO claims "Among healthy adults, influenza vaccine can prevent 70% to 90% of influenza-specific illness. Among the elderly, the vaccine reduces severe illnesses and complications by up to 60%, and deaths by 80%."

Information below shows WHO claims are false and misleading. So are the CDC's and NIH's and doubly so for the new Swine Flu vaccines.

All Vaccines Are Ineffective and Unsafe

Gary Null is a leading health and nutrition expert, author, documentary filmmaker, founder of the Progressive Radio Network, and syndicated host of the longest running health program in America, Natural Living with Gary Null.

On September 18, 2009, he interviewed Dr. Viera Scheibner, "arguably one of the world's most respected scientists and scholars on vaccine medical data....Her investigations uncover how the vaccine industrial complex (and complicit government regulatory bodies produce) pseudo-science that is fraught with inconsistencies, poorly designed studies, erroneous interpretations, and conclusions that are patently false" - by design, not chance.

She calls vaccinations "an illness industry," causing a "pandemic (of) degenerative diseases (and) behavioral problems."

From her research and writings on vaccine science and history, she said:

"Ever since the turn of the (last) century, medical journals published dozens and dozens of articles demonstrating that injecting vaccines (can) cause anaphylaxis, meaning harmful, inappropriate immunological responses, which is also called sensitization. (This) increase(s) susceptibility to the disease which the vaccine is supposed to prevent, and to a host of related and other unrelated infections."

"We see it in vaccinated children within days, within two or three weeks. (Most of them) develop runny noses, ear infections, pneumonitis, (and) bronchiolitis. It is only a matter of degrees, which indicates immuno-suppression, (not immunity). It indicates the opposite. So I never use the word immunization because that is false advertising. It implies that vaccines immunize, which they don't. The correct term is either vaccination or sensitization."

In addition, "Vaccines (can) damage internal organs, particularly the pancreas," so everyone vaccinated, including for seasonal flu, is vulnerable to contracting severe "autoimmune diseases like diabetes," Addison's Disease, Arthritis, Asthma, Guillian-Barre Syndrome, Hepatitis, Lou Gehrig's Disease, Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, Osteoporosis, Polio, and dozens of others.

Some can kill. Others produce a lifetime of disability and pain because autoimmune disease happens when the "body attacks itself," or more accurately "is attacked" by an unhealthy lifestyle, stress, and various harmful ingestible substances; that is, toxins in drugs, food, air, water, and other liquids. According to immunologist, Dr. Jesse Stoff, human health is compromised four ways:

-- by poor nutrition;

-- man-made environmental toxins;

-- disease-causing organisms and their toxins; and

-- immune system trauma from factors like x-ray radiation and stress.

Other factors include a lack of sleep and exercise, smoking, heavy alcohol consumption, and various excesses that throw the body out of balance, making it susceptible to a host of debilitating illnesses.

Known Toxins in Seasonal Flu and Other Vaccines

Millions voluntarily take annual flu shots not knowing their harmful ingredients. With variations by producer, they contain numerous stabilizers, neutralizers, carrying agents, and preservatives, including:

-- 25 micrograms of mercury (thimerosal), a known neurotoxin; one microgram is considered toxic; according to the NIH, "mercury and all of its compounds are toxic, exposure to excessive levels can permanently damage or fatally injure the brain and kidneys;" even "exposures to very small amounts" can also cause "allergic reactions, neurological damage and death;" it's also linked to autism;

-- aluminum hydroxide and phosphate, known to be linked to some neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease; the Office of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reports x-ray evidence of pulmonary fibrosis among workers studied; it also reports that patients undergoing long-term kidney dialysis develop speech disorders, dementia, or convulsions;

-- formaldehyde, a known carcinogen according to the National Cancer Institute; it's also linked to upper respiratory tract problems and effects on lymphatic and hematopoietic systems (relating to human blood cells);

-- gelatin, polysorbate 80 and resin - ingredients causing severe allergic reactions;

-- ammonium sulfate, a suspected gastrointestinal, liver, and respiratory toxicant and neurotoxicant;

-- sorbitol, a suspected gastrointestinal and liver toxicant;

-- phenoxyethanol (antifreeze), a suspected developmental and reproductive toxicant;

-- beta-propiolactone, a known carcinogen and suspected gastrointestinal, liver, respiratory, skin and sense organ toxicant;

-- gentamycin, an antibiotic;

-- triton X100, a strong detergent;

-- animal tissues and fluids, including potentially contaminated horse blood, rabbit brain, dog kidney, monkey kidney, chick embryo, chicken egg, duck egg, pig blood, and porcine (pig) protein/tissue;

-- calf and fetal bovine serum;

-- macerated cancer cells;

-- diploid cells from aborted fetal tissue; and/or

-- other ingredients varying by producer.

Contrary to industry and government agency advice, annual flu shots are dangerous and ineffective. According to Croft Woodruff, president of the EDTA Chelation Association of British Columbia:

"Statistically, you'd be more likely to avoid the flu if you took nothing at all. So why are we subjected to the flu vaccine media blitz each year?" In a word, profits assured annually as long as enough people take them - for all vaccines (besides the enormous bonanza from the Swine Flu vaccines), billions of dollars in annual revenues, according to leading producer estimates.

On September 29, Wall Street Journal writers Jonathan Rockoff and Peter Loftus explained that the industry believes vaccines:

"will become an increasingly important source of growth to replace aging blockbusters that are poised to lose patent protection. Vaccine sales are growing faster than sales of other prescription medicines and are largely immune to the generic competition that is already cost drug makers billions of dollars in revenues on their top-selling treatments. Moreover, government agencies both in the US and around the world are increasingly reliable buyers of vaccines as they seek to stockpile medicines that could help protect the public in case of a major flu outbreak."

Or perhaps, in the case of Swine Flu, infect it as part of a sinister depopulation scheme through involuntary male and/or female sterilization and future deadly illnesses while rewarding producers with hundreds of billions in profits from global inoculations over the next few years. For what may be planned, it doesn't get any better than that. As a result, the public is cautioned to ignore media and official hype and stay safe by refusing all vaccines, especially the new Swine Flu ones that may, in fact, be bioweapons.

More Disclaimers about Flu Vaccine Effectiveness and the Truth about Their Dangers

First the worst news. Annual flu shots may induce one or more of the above-mentioned annoying to life-threatening autoimmune diseases, including severe allergies, diabetes, and the Guillan-Barre Syndrome (GBS) nerve disorder that causes progressive muscle weakness, paralysis, and at times death. They can also cause encephalitis, an acute inflammation of the brain; various neurological disorders; and thrombocytopenia, a serious blood disorder.

Now the bad news. Annual flu shots don't work, except to enhance producer profits, which is why the industry, complicit regulatory bodies, and the media tell unsuspecting people to take them.

Each year, government health agencies guess which viral strain(s) are most worrisome. Usually they're wrong. For example, New York Times writer Lawrence Altman headlined his January 15, 2004 article, "Vaccine Is Said to Fail to Protect Against Flu Strain" in reporting that the CDC said its most recent recommended flu vaccine had "no or low effectiveness" against that season's Fujian threat, based on study results from its first ever health providers survey. Other studies report similar findings, and so do reliable scientists from their research.

The Lancet reported that a 2008 study on "immunocompetent elderly people aged 65 - 94 years enrolled in Group Health (a health maintenance organisation) during 2000, 2001, and 2002" found that "influenza vaccination was not associated with a reduced risk of community-acquired pneumonia during the influenza season." Influenza predisposes individuals to contracting pneumonia.

In understated terms, the prestigious medical journal concluded that "The effect of influenza vaccination on the risk of pneumonia in elderly people during the influenza seasons might be less than previously estimated." Yet doctors keep recommending them based on misleading industry and government information.

In October 2007, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health reported on the "mortality benefits of influenza vaccination in elderly people: an ongoing controversy" and concluded:

"frailty selection bias and use of non-specific endpoints such as all-cause mortality have led cohort studies to greatly exaggerate vaccine benefits. The remaining evidence base is currently insufficient to indicate the magnitude of the mortality benefit, if any, that elderly people derive from the vaccination programme."

On May 1, 2003, The New England Journal of Medicine reported on the largest ever study to determine the effectiveness of pneumococcal pneumonia vaccine inoculations - based on medical data for 47,365 people aged 65 or older from 1998 - 2001. It found no significant association between vaccination and a reduced pneumonia risk in concluding:

"alternative strategies are needed to prevent nonbacteremic pneumonia, which is a more common manifestation of pneumococcal infection in elderly persons." In other words, flu shots don't work, so why take them.

An October 2008 published study in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine had similar conclusions based on doctor visits during the two most recent flu seasons. It reported:

"In 2 seasons with suboptimal antigenic match between vaccines and circulating strains, we could not demonstrate VE in preventing influenza-related inpatient/ED or outpatient visits in children younger than 5 years. Further study is needed during years with good vaccine match."

In September 2008, the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine reported that the Department of Public Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Alberta concluded as follows from "clinical, laboratory, and functional data" collected on 1,813 adults "with community-acquired pneumonia admitted to six hospitals outside of influenza season" in Alberta:

"mortality benefits of influenza vaccination" are "overestimated" even though the population inoculated increased from 15% in 1980 to 65% in 2008.

In the October 2006 British Medical Journal, Dr. Tom Jefferson wrote about "Influenza vaccination: policy versus evidence" and concluded:

"Evidence from systematic reviews shows that inactivated vaccines have little or no effect on the effects measured. (In addition), Little comparative evidence exists on the safety of these vaccines....The optimistic and confident tone of some predictions of viral circulation and the impact of inactivated vaccines, which are at odds with the evidence, is striking. The reasons are probably complex and may involve a messy blend of truth and conflicts of interest making it difficult to separate factual disputes from value disputes."

In other words, influenza vaccination programs are ineffective and worthless. They're also dangerous.

In 2006, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews reported on an Oxford University, Institute of Health Sciences examination of "Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy children" and concluded from the results of 51 studies involving 263,987 subjects aged 23 months to six years that vaccines are little more effective than placebos. It added that:

"If immunisation in children is to be recommended as a public-health policy, large-scale studies assessing important outcomes and directly comparing vaccine types are urgently needed."

FDA-Approved Swine Flu (H1N1) Vaccines

On September 15, the FDA:

"announced today that it has approved four vaccines against the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus. The vaccines will be distributed nationally after the initial lots become available, which is expected to be within the next four weeks....Based on preliminary data from adults participating in multiple clinical trials, the 2009 H1N1 vaccines induce a robust immune response in most health adults eight to 10 days after a single dose, as occurs with the seasonal influenza vaccine."

The FDA warned that "People with severe or life-threatening allergies to chicken eggs, or to any other substance in the vaccine, should not be vaccinated."

Approved US vaccines are produced by CSL Ltd., Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics Ltd., Sanofi Pasteur (a division of Sanofi-Aventis Group), and AstraZeneca's MedImmune LLC. According to the FDA, "All four firms manufacture the H1N1 vaccines using the same processes, which have a long record of producing safe seasonal influenza vaccines."

Meanwhile, other governments have placed large orders for Baxter's CELVAPAN A/H1N1 vaccine, Novavax's VLP, and GlaxoSmithKline PLC's versions to assure all the major vaccine producers share in the enormous profit bonanza.

Sanofi Pasteur's vaccine proved ineffective with one shot, and Medscape Medical News reported that while it will have fewer side effects it may not protect against the 2009 H1N1 strain.

Novartis' version contains its proprietary squalene adjuvant MF59, linked to annoying to potentially deadly autoimmune and other diseases, including paralysis, autism, Alzheimer's disease, and Gulf War Syndrome. Glaxo's ASO3 poses the same risks and will be available in America through CSL Ltd.'s vaccine.

Squalene in vaccines has been secretly used for years, but according to Dr. Rima Laibow, Medical Director of the Natural Solutions Foundation:

"Never before has (it) been (officially) approved for use in a drug in the United States. But once before, when it was allowed in certain military vaccines, more than 60,000 soldiers were hospitalized (by what became) known as 'Gulf War Syndrome.' (In Doe v. Rumsfeld, a) Federal Court in 2004, forbade its involuntary use by United States troops."

"This new (Swine Flu) vaccine has, literally, 1,000,000 time more squalene than the experimental military vaccine, known as 'Vaccine A.' The attempt to rush this dangerous vaccine into the bodies of the public without safety testing is a violation of US law, regulation and medical ethics and must be condemned."

Glaxo (GSK) will distribute CSL Ltd.'s vaccine with its own proprietary high potency squalene adjuvant MPL (monophosphoryl lipid A) system ASO3 that exponentially enhances its dangers as Dr. Laibow explained.

After being linked to Gulf War Syndrome, Army scientists concluded from over two dozen post-war animal studies that nanodoses dangerously compromise the human immune system and may also kill.

MedImmune says it FluMist is a "gentle nasal mist. It's a quick spray in each nostril, one of the places where the flu virus enters the body. (It) helps your body develop proteins called antibodies that help protect you from the flu."

Dr. Rima Laibow calls FluMist a "recipe for pandemic. (It) contains 3 live viruses. You shoot it up your nose and your immune system gets a chance to make antibodies to three live, weakened viruses while the manufacturer hopes against hope that one of these three actually causes a disease this year....Of course, if you are immune compromised or go near someone who is, you will get sick or infect them with the virus and they can get the flu."

Laibow and others also warn that Flu Mist risks potential brain damage, making it an extremely hazardous drug. The nasal passage olfactory tract is a direct pathway to the brain. Ingesting viruses through it risks encephalitis, a viral-induced acute brain inflammation.

British geneticist and bilphysicist Dr. Mae-Wan and biologist Joe Cummins add that:

"Vaccines can be dangerous, especially live, attenuated viral vaccines or the new recombinant nucleic acid vaccines, that have the potential to generate virulent viruses by recombination and the recombinant nucleic acids could cause autoimmune diseases."

According to Medimmune, "FluMist is a (nasal administered) vaccine approved for the prevention of certain types of influenza disease in children, adolescents, and adults 2 - 49 years of age," except for:

-- children and adolescents regularly taking aspirin or products containing it; or persons with certain:

-- sensitivities,

-- health problems,

-- illnesses,

-- malignancies,

-- immunodeficiencies,

-- nutritional deficiencies,

-- abnormalities,

-- allergies, or

-- infections - categories applying to the majority of the population, including many in it unaware it means them.

MedImmune's product information states:

"Administration of Influenza A (H1N1) 2009 Monovalent Vaccine Live, Intranasal, a live virus vaccine, to immunocompromised persons should be based on careful consideration of potential benefits and risks. Safety has not been established in individuals with underlying medical conditions predisposing them to wild-type influenza infection complications."

"Appropriate medical treatment and supervision must be available to manage possible anaphylactic (life-threatening allergic) reactions following administration of the vaccine....Hypersensitivity, including anaphylactic reaction, has been reported during post-marketing experience with FluMist....Intranasal may not protect all individuals receiving the vaccine."

Each producer lists numerous adverse reactions to its vaccines. Those MedImmune reported included:

-- "Congenital, familial and genetic disorder: Exacerbation of symptoms of mitochondrial encephalomyopathy (Leigh syndrome);

-- Gastrointestinal disorders: Nausea, vomiting and diarrhea;

-- Immune system disorders: Hypersensitivity reactions (including anaphylactic reaction, facial edema and urticaria);

-- Nervous system disorders: Guillain-Barre syndrome, Bell's Palsy;

-- Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders: Epistaxis;" and

-- "Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders: Rash."

The FDA has not approved nasal vaccine sprays for children under two, adults over 49, or pregnant women. Product instructions also warn that:

"FluMist recipients should avoid close contact with immunocompromised individuals for at least 21 days," that should include health care workers but it doesn't. It suggests the likelihood that the vaccine's live virus will spread among immune-weakened hospital patients and elsewhere through close contact with their providers.

In their article titled, Vaccines' Dark Inferno, Gary Null and Richard Gale warn that:

"The vast majority of scientists, physicians, nurses and public health educators' trust that the ingredients in a vaccine have been individually and synergistically proven safe and effective." So do most people, even though commonly held beliefs are wrong, including by professionals who should know better. Because they don't, their patients' are endangered by the array of above toxins that in combination with new ones can trigger "a pandemic of Vaccine Disease, manifesting in myriad illnesses (including the new H1N1) dependent upon each vaccinated person's genetic predisposition and the robustness of (their) immune system(s to withstand) any epidemic threat posed by wild infectious pathogens (that) could unfold in so-called developed, hygienic society."

Since most governments sacrifice human health for business profits, who are the guardians to protect us from the coming pathogenic onslaught that may weaken or destroy the immune systems of millions of unsuspecting people, and likely sterilize and/or kill them. Something to consider before submitting to dangerous vaccines that everyone has a legal, ethical and for many a medical right to refuse.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Center for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.