Some of you - okay, lots of you - have emailed me to point out that the chart showing United States influenza deaths in the last previous Stack is NOT adjusted for the growing population.
In other words, all else being equal, we would expect influenza deaths to rise as the population grows, so maybe the fact they haven’t shows the vaccines work after all? At least a little?
Before I answer, a side note: I love Team Reality! You keep me honest.
Now, let me point out a few other things the chart is not adjusted for:
The aging population (which should tend to increase deaths)
Falling levels of smoking and lung cancer (decrease)
General improvements in healthcare, including mechanical ventilation (decrease)
Tamiflu (decrease, maybe, the evidence is weak)
Different strains of flu (depends on the strain)
No doubt you can come up with others.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
All else is not equal. Trying to measure the net effects of all those changes is difficult even for someone with no incoming ideological bias. Using population-level data can be tricky, because many different changes can occur simultaneously. Measuring the effect of any single variable with precision can be difficult.
But.
BUT.
The key words there are with precision.
In the 1980-81 flu season Americans received 12 million flu shots. In the 2017-18 season, they received 155 million.
In the 1980-81 season, the United States had 227 million people and about 20,000 flu deaths. In the 2017-18 season, the United States had 327 million people and 52,000-81,000 flu deaths (the Centers for Disease Control initially estimated 81,000, then years later - after Covid hit - offered the new lower estimate. Which had the effect of making Covid look even worse. Which definitely wasn’t why they made the change. But I digress.)
Here’s the point.
If the flu vaccine reduced the risk of death in any meaningful way, increasing its use 12-fold - use that is explicitly directed at the elderly, who are most vulnerable - would have SOME visible impact on overall mortality from influenza deaths. It has none.
Okay, 2017-18 was just one year - what about the long-term trend?
At best, we can say population has increased slowly, while flu vaccinations increased very quickly - and flu deaths have jumped around without any discernible pattern.
More CDC data, this time for the 30 years ending in 2007:
This dataset actually looks even WORSE for the shots. Please note the numbers run distinctly higher from top to bottom. That is, the trend is toward more influenza deaths year after year - AS FLU SHOTS INCREASE.
To be clear: this evidence doesn’t prove flu shots cause flu deaths. But it sure doesn’t prove they do any good, either.
—
If your friendly public health bureaucrats wanted to prove influenza shots reduced influenza deaths, they could do so lickety-split.
They would just have to run a large randomized controlled trial (ideally two or three trials, over two or three flu seasons) that enrolled, say, 25,000 elderly people at high risk of death from flu and split them into placebo and flu shot groups.
This trial would be perfectly ethical, because at the moment we have clinical equipoise - a fancy way of saying that no one really knows if the shot does any good. It would cost a tiny fraction of what we now spend on flu shots, not to mention the associated flu shot advertising campaigns.
And it would give us a definitive answer. Within a few months after the end of flu season we would know - not guess, know - whether flu vaccines actually reduced flu deaths. We could even look at ALL-CAUSE mortality, and find out whether the vaccine might be causing other problems that we are not catching (or possibly even have some hidden benefits, who knows? That’s why you run the trial!).
So why haven’t your friendly public health bureaucrats run this trial. They have pushed these shots increasingly hard for the last 40 years, and especially the last 10. Don’t they WANT to know if they work?
I’ll give you a hint.
Of course not.
As long as they don’t know the vaccines are useless, they can continue to insist they are useful - and that the only problem is that not enough people have received them.
The risks of finding the truth far outweigh the rewards. Not for the people getting the shots. For the bureaucrats pushing them and the companies selling them.
Another way to say it is that if flu shots were largely effective, flu deaths would be near zero at this point. If COVID shots were anywhere near as effective as advertised, COVID would have been over many months ago & we wouldn't be discussing <5 year olds & second boosters.
Ok. When I turned 62 (6 years ago) I started to get a flu shot. After the SHITSHOW of 20/21 I absolutely refuse to get any flu or covid shot. Done like a dinner……
The reason we have no large, randomized trials comparing flu outcomes in vaxxed vs. unvaxxed elderly is the same reason we have no large studies looking at autism rates in fully vaxxed vs. unvaxxed children. No rocket science degree is needed to figure this one out.
i find it's better to opt for less medical intervention. obviously emergency surgery is an exception but for the most part, stay away. for me that means: no annual check ups, no mammograms, no routine screenings or vaccinations. as long as i feel good, i don't go looking for trouble. it means going to an integrative or functional doctor who doesn't take insurance and functions outside of the system. it means turning down the "free" annual home visit from a nurse that my insurance company provides.
the medical industrial complex has many jobs and it needs you to be continually sick to keep all those jobs going. as a nation, we would all be way better off without a fauci, a collins and a walensky, with an FDA that is supported by the tax payers and not by pharma, and with a much smaller (if any) CDC
I am 64. I got one flu shot in my life during the fall of 2017. Three weeks after I got the shot I got one of the worst illnesses of my life. I went to the doctor (who had pushed the flu shot). She tested me for "influenza" and said I came out negative (which is what she told me in advance she believed would be the case. I then asked her if there could be any connection to having gotten the flu shot and my experience of a serious virus (no less horrific than a serious flue) just three weeks later. Guess what she told me? She said that there's a possibility my immune system was under stress from the flu shot which made me more vulnerable to contracting a serious illness from a different type of virus.
I replied, "Gee, thanks for telling me that now." I never got another flu shot and never will. Ohhh, and when I asked her in the late spring of 2020 what her treatment options were for COVID she told me that we are to stay at home and rest and increase vitamin C. She then went on the offense about the use of hydroxychloroquine even though I didn't bring it up. She didn't bother to suggest I lose weight (I was 60 lbs overweight at that time).
I fired her on that phone call. One of the best decisions I ever made.
I worked in medical distribution and I can vouch for the push by McKesson Corp to sell as many flu vaccines as possible. Everyone was required to sell at least 1,200 vials annually. If you didn’t they would threaten to take your ability to sell flu vaccines and have another representative call on your accounts to sell them. McKesson being the same company that fired employees for not getting injected with the gene therapy shots they directly profit from. Corporate healthcare at its finest. Follow the money…never about actually about health.
Frankly, I no longer care about any of the data. I don’t trust that ANY of it is accurate, anyway. It just doesn’t seem to matter to me any more, as I am never again going to get any injections of any kind. I admit to being sick and tired of graphs, charts, data. I used to review them to help in decision-making. No longer needed; I’ve made my decisions.
I love that you keep the conversation going. Problem is we can’t expect adults to enter the room. We are dealing with “health officials” who buy their own bobble heads!! We can never forget what they did to our country and, especially, our children!!
They will never do trials to see if the flu shot works, just like they wouldn't do any scientific studies to see what kinds of masks worked best. (None of them.)
It's also why they allowed Pfizer and Moderna to blow up their "Vaccine" trials. They definitely don't want to know if they are "safe and effective."
Ehh of course it's about money. Also the overwhelming majority of journalists the last thirty years are liberals. They aren't going to go against the status quo. They don't even have the balls to say Lia Thomas has an unfair advantage over other female swimmers. You think they would go against big pharma? LOL.... they don't want two in the back of the head
If Alex doesn’t watch out he will start pointing his investigative skills at the safety and efficacy of other shots on the CDC schedule and then he might REALLY find some interesting stuff that some of us have known for a long time. It can be seen if you want to see it.
Never mind flu shots. Did anyone see THIS? Is he revving up for another round of tyranny?
On Sunday, the Grand High Exalted Omnipotent Mystical Medical Guru of Health, Healing and Wizardry, Anthony "I am the Science" Fauci warned:
"If things change and we do get a variant that does give us an uptick in cases and hospitalization, we should be prepared and flexible enough to pivot toward going back – at least temporarily – to a more rigid type of restrictions, such as requiring masks indoor."
At the risk of repeating myself: I worked as a hospital nurse in the 80s, early 90s. No one got flu shots. It was certainly not mandated. When I turned 51 my PCP said, "oh, you need a flu shot". I was skeptical. She assured me it was safe and recommended for anyone over 50. "Ok". First shot, no problem. Second shot age 52: incapacitated by sudden intense burning pain down right arm into index finger, many M.D. visits later diagnosed with brachial neuritis. Could not lift my right arm up over my head for 14 months due to partial paralysis of muscles in my shoulder girdle (an immune mediated response) with a winged scapula.
2022, age 60: permanent neuropathy right hand/fingers/thumb, right shoulder/arm weaker with atrophy. I learned all about the VICP, submitted my case and 3 years later I received a modest settlement from Uncle Sam. No flu shot since nor will I ever do it again. I doubt I'll take any vaccine again. I was maimed for life. Flu shots are unnecessary, dangerous and highly ineffective.
If you look at the CDC all cause mortality charts, most “flu” deaths are actually pneumonia deaths. I just heard a talk by Dr Bryan Ardis about this very thing, although other people have been pointing this out for years. Lumping pneumonia deaths in with flu deaths makes many people think they need a flu shot. A study done a few years ago at Walter Reed found that getting a flu shot can increase your risk by 36% of getting other respiratory illnesses. Also keep in mind that many people who think they have the flu really have a different respiratory virus. They don’t test everyone who thinks they have to flu to see if they really have the flu, but they can get counted as flu cases.
Backs up my personal anecdotal evidence- husband: flu shot mandated for work: gets flu every time, me- sleeps next to guy, doesn’t get flu shot, doesn’t get flu. Dr says “would have been worse flu without the shot”. Cant prove a negative.
So, if the flu shots do not result in a discernable improvement in healthy outcomes, why has it become a standard component of routine healthcare? Who benefits from a vaccination that does nothing to change the outcome?
Those are rhetorical questions - just follow the money.
Put another way, "As long as they don't know the vaccines are unsafe and ineffective, they can continue to insist they are safe and effective." If I am supposed to trust the science, shouldn't science be all about the truth, especially when it comes to public health. Too many have fallen for the Big Lie and our best weapon is the truth. "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free." Stay strong and free!
Cochrane reports have looked at the very few clinical trials for the flu shot and have found little to no efficacy or maybe a trend to efficacy. Some trials also show thAt annual flu shots do weaken immunity over time. As a healthcare worker I fought them every year til I retired. As a Medical Director I refused to mandate flu shots or masks in lieu of flu shot and fought my hospital leadership til basically it was time to go or get fired. As a former industrial hygienist I understood the limits of masks years ago. As a happy retiree I stay as far away from the algorithm-driven health care as possible.
The ongoing Covid vaccine jihad and massive public dishonesty campaign had a predecessor. History seems to always repeat itself. Thank you for providing data to cement what I had long suspected: Flu shots are a near-complete waste of time and money, driven by Group Think.
Well stated as usual Alex. I've usually gotten the flu shot because it seems to be quite low risk for side effects and maybe it helps a little? This data pretty much confirms it really doesn't help. In the future I think I'll skip the inconvenience of a pointless stop at Walgreens.
Let us not forget the influenza strains that may be popular are predicted 3-5 years out. It's why the vaccines don't work all that well; mainly because the populace isn't introduced to the predicted strains. Vaccinated patients may be hospitalized or die because they caught a different strain. It's been made crystal clear the CDC et al are not prognosticators. Like, bigly.
Thank you for answering a question I have been hearing from others but did not have any data to support an answer, do influenza vaccines really work? You are right that flu vaccines do not demonstrate any level of effectiveness, and am not surprised but I am disappointed that this appears to be the case. I am old enough to remember going to the local high school and getting a sugar cube that contained the Sabin polio vaccine. At the time, it seemed cool to a little kid to get in line and get sugar cubes! I just read a book on Polio and as it turns out Polio was never really the epidemic that it was portrayed either. Most kids got a type of Polio that they most likely did not even notice and got natural life time immunity to all Polio types, but the poor kids that needed leg braces, and the pathetic iron lung pics that got the ball rolling, with FDR being the poster child. I guess we must be completely skeptical of everything. It is a pathetic what this has all come down to.
"As long as they don’t know the vaccines are useless, they can continue to insist they are useful - and that the only problem is that not enough people have received them."
My opinion, as informed as it may or may not be, is that history will show the 2020-era mRNA flu shots were not useless, but HARMFUL. I don't think it hyperbolic to speculate that a decade from now we may be talking about "COVID Vaccines" like we do today about DES (diethylstilbestrol).
The ineffectiveness of the flu vaccine has been known to researchers for ~15-20 years. Here are 3 peer-reviewed studies from respected journals that highlight the phenomenon:
An honest Geriatric internal medicine doctor will tell you that >65 give you zero protection from catch the flu that season. Because most of the time they make the wrong formula that was planned for that season. And most already have natural immunity for life anyways. Now with these latest mRNA shot who they focused so much on the elderly when you see the numbers of deaths from previous years you will see they have done far more harm than good. Other words you cut the lifetime of your loved ones. Dont forget people like Berenson had to wear many hats for the past 2 years where most patients could not have family or loved ones visiting the ones, he has cared for the mental wear toll that it puts on you. This is something that most have no clue or experienced. There is a lot of hurting people here in America and the media ignoring the truth and all the lies they have told talking about WW3 is never going to fix the damages they have created and have done to millions.
We need studies on all the shots! 54% of our kids are chronically ill. Autism is now 1 in 37. If it keeps going at its current rate we will be at 1 in 2 kids by 2030. This is the real pandemic.
RFK Jr for President or at least Secretary of HHS.
And all of our great scientists forget about the elementary chemical concept of synergy. That's where combining two chemicals or shots can get you an entirely different third chemical or effect. Did they test the synergy of giving you the flu shot with the covid shot? Of course not.
Oh and did you know that they never bothered to test the covid shot for cancer or genotoxicity? Or reproductive harm? Yah, the rats don't breed fast enough. But with tens of thousands of woman complaining about menstrual cycle irregularities, we know that reproduction is affected.
Start a whisper campaign: The covid 19 vaccine was never tested for cancer. And the whistleblowing doctors from the military are saying that cancer is up 300% according to their database (before it was tampered with).
So the FDA committee on approving the shots for our babies meets April 6th. See the Toby Rogers substack for info. Save our babies!!
We do NOT 'adjust' data (except perhaps economic, where it makes sense). Adjusted data is not data. At best it is an approximation. At worst, it is an attempt to fit observation to theory (instead of the other way around).
I would be able to break down the efficacy of the flu vaccine by all those factors if they gave me the raw data and the raw data supported that breakdown (i.e. if there were the appropriate and consistent fields associated with age, smoker status, ...). It really shouldn't be too hard. Usually, the hardest thing about this type of analysis is trying to understand their data format. I did that kind of crap for over 40 years for the DoD. It is possible that they just didn't look at the efficacy but that would be idiotic. My guess is that they did look and just didn't like the results. They didn't want to encourage vaccine hesitancy.
The was really “useful” for me Alex, thank you. Plus Medicare irritatingly keeps reminding me to get a flu shot, I stopped my yearly flu vaccines starting last year (HATED the side effects of feeling sick & sore 3 days). I’ll take my chances fending off ALL the viruses on my own now.
Illness is with multiple factors and impacts, as is treatment. You can put 100 people in a room and expose them to the same quantity of an infectious pathogen, and there could be as many as 100 different responses.
So, you can’t compare the 80 year old woman to the eight-year-old boy, nor can you compare the 30 year old husband to the 32-year-old wife, and certainly you can’t compare the intellectually disordered person to a rocket scientist.
At the end of the day, if you let nonclinical people define how an illness attacks and disrupts and diminishes a population, you won’t get the right answers. They may have non-medical perspectives that could provide some insight to factors that can aggravate the illness as well as impact on treating it, but, I don’t tell politicians how to legislate, besides creating laws that are only gonna fuck up mine and other peoples lives while these scumbags running the country are completely unaffected!…
So, here’s the tip, if you give somebody a treatment intervention and it’s working minimally or less effectively at least 20 or more percent of the time, you should be cautious, reluctant, and suspicious.
This “vaccine“ or “inoculation“ is not grounded in reality, it’s about money prestige and in the end, I think genocide.
"Evidence suggests that repeated influenza vaccination may reduce vaccine effectiveness (VE)." Well, so much for that annual flu shot!
Worth reading the PDF of the study included in the link, e.g.:
"It has been suggested that the protection conferred by influenza vaccine in a season could prevent the natural immunity from exposure to circulating influenza viruses, and may therefore increase the risk of infection and impact VE in subsequent seasons [7]."
Running potable water, good sanitation systems, exercise, good diet, and eschewing pharmaceutical poisons and 24/7 propaganda streams seem to be the most effective preventives against most diseases, including mental health disorders.
I think they use the same relative efficacy when talking about flu shots as Covid shots rather than absolute efficacy. That always makes a difference to actual real world efficacy of these shots. When you look at absolute efficacy I think they are not so helpful if I can recall rightly. A whole ton of people need to get shots to save one person from hospitalization and death.
Given that we are dealing with government agencies notorious for manipulating the data as it pleases to advance a wicked agenda, and a pharmaceutical industry that effectively owns those government agencies, keeping in mind that Pfizer has been effectively operating a continuing criminal enterprise at least since 2004 and 2009, how can the data we see be considered valid?
"And it would give us a definitive answer. Within a few months after the end of flu season we would know - not guess, know - whether flu vaccines actually reduced flu deaths. " Ah Ha! Got you now Alex. Your study did not measure the critical - "but you got less sick" - measurement we use for the mRNA!! /s
What is the basis for the number of flu deaths? Isn't it just an estimation? If yes, you would need to examine the bases for this estimation, too, right?
There are no “strains”. Perhaps you’re catching on (barely) that shots don’t make you healthy or protect you, instead they give you toxicity which can cause illness, symptoms, and death.
For you amateur (or professional) data scientists
Alex, let's not forget healthy user bias.
http://vaccinepapers.org/healthy-user-bias-why-most-vaccine-safety-studies-are-wrong/
Another way to say it is that if flu shots were largely effective, flu deaths would be near zero at this point. If COVID shots were anywhere near as effective as advertised, COVID would have been over many months ago & we wouldn't be discussing <5 year olds & second boosters.
They are not incentivized to conduct real risk/reward analysis. All they want perpetual mandatory subscription revenue.
Ok. When I turned 62 (6 years ago) I started to get a flu shot. After the SHITSHOW of 20/21 I absolutely refuse to get any flu or covid shot. Done like a dinner……
I am finished with all vaccines... i am finally awake
The reason we have no large, randomized trials comparing flu outcomes in vaxxed vs. unvaxxed elderly is the same reason we have no large studies looking at autism rates in fully vaxxed vs. unvaxxed children. No rocket science degree is needed to figure this one out.
The wisest comment to understand these issues - “follow the money.”
i find it's better to opt for less medical intervention. obviously emergency surgery is an exception but for the most part, stay away. for me that means: no annual check ups, no mammograms, no routine screenings or vaccinations. as long as i feel good, i don't go looking for trouble. it means going to an integrative or functional doctor who doesn't take insurance and functions outside of the system. it means turning down the "free" annual home visit from a nurse that my insurance company provides.
the medical industrial complex has many jobs and it needs you to be continually sick to keep all those jobs going. as a nation, we would all be way better off without a fauci, a collins and a walensky, with an FDA that is supported by the tax payers and not by pharma, and with a much smaller (if any) CDC
So savage with your data. I love it.
I am 64. I got one flu shot in my life during the fall of 2017. Three weeks after I got the shot I got one of the worst illnesses of my life. I went to the doctor (who had pushed the flu shot). She tested me for "influenza" and said I came out negative (which is what she told me in advance she believed would be the case. I then asked her if there could be any connection to having gotten the flu shot and my experience of a serious virus (no less horrific than a serious flue) just three weeks later. Guess what she told me? She said that there's a possibility my immune system was under stress from the flu shot which made me more vulnerable to contracting a serious illness from a different type of virus.
I replied, "Gee, thanks for telling me that now." I never got another flu shot and never will. Ohhh, and when I asked her in the late spring of 2020 what her treatment options were for COVID she told me that we are to stay at home and rest and increase vitamin C. She then went on the offense about the use of hydroxychloroquine even though I didn't bring it up. She didn't bother to suggest I lose weight (I was 60 lbs overweight at that time).
I fired her on that phone call. One of the best decisions I ever made.
I worked in medical distribution and I can vouch for the push by McKesson Corp to sell as many flu vaccines as possible. Everyone was required to sell at least 1,200 vials annually. If you didn’t they would threaten to take your ability to sell flu vaccines and have another representative call on your accounts to sell them. McKesson being the same company that fired employees for not getting injected with the gene therapy shots they directly profit from. Corporate healthcare at its finest. Follow the money…never about actually about health.
Frankly, I no longer care about any of the data. I don’t trust that ANY of it is accurate, anyway. It just doesn’t seem to matter to me any more, as I am never again going to get any injections of any kind. I admit to being sick and tired of graphs, charts, data. I used to review them to help in decision-making. No longer needed; I’ve made my decisions.
I love that you keep the conversation going. Problem is we can’t expect adults to enter the room. We are dealing with “health officials” who buy their own bobble heads!! We can never forget what they did to our country and, especially, our children!!
Excellent points, Alex!
They will never do trials to see if the flu shot works, just like they wouldn't do any scientific studies to see what kinds of masks worked best. (None of them.)
It's also why they allowed Pfizer and Moderna to blow up their "Vaccine" trials. They definitely don't want to know if they are "safe and effective."
Ehh of course it's about money. Also the overwhelming majority of journalists the last thirty years are liberals. They aren't going to go against the status quo. They don't even have the balls to say Lia Thomas has an unfair advantage over other female swimmers. You think they would go against big pharma? LOL.... they don't want two in the back of the head
If Alex doesn’t watch out he will start pointing his investigative skills at the safety and efficacy of other shots on the CDC schedule and then he might REALLY find some interesting stuff that some of us have known for a long time. It can be seen if you want to see it.
Never mind flu shots. Did anyone see THIS? Is he revving up for another round of tyranny?
On Sunday, the Grand High Exalted Omnipotent Mystical Medical Guru of Health, Healing and Wizardry, Anthony "I am the Science" Fauci warned:
"If things change and we do get a variant that does give us an uptick in cases and hospitalization, we should be prepared and flexible enough to pivot toward going back – at least temporarily – to a more rigid type of restrictions, such as requiring masks indoor."
Hey, you pompous fraud, "pivot" THIS!
At the risk of repeating myself: I worked as a hospital nurse in the 80s, early 90s. No one got flu shots. It was certainly not mandated. When I turned 51 my PCP said, "oh, you need a flu shot". I was skeptical. She assured me it was safe and recommended for anyone over 50. "Ok". First shot, no problem. Second shot age 52: incapacitated by sudden intense burning pain down right arm into index finger, many M.D. visits later diagnosed with brachial neuritis. Could not lift my right arm up over my head for 14 months due to partial paralysis of muscles in my shoulder girdle (an immune mediated response) with a winged scapula.
2022, age 60: permanent neuropathy right hand/fingers/thumb, right shoulder/arm weaker with atrophy. I learned all about the VICP, submitted my case and 3 years later I received a modest settlement from Uncle Sam. No flu shot since nor will I ever do it again. I doubt I'll take any vaccine again. I was maimed for life. Flu shots are unnecessary, dangerous and highly ineffective.
If you look at the CDC all cause mortality charts, most “flu” deaths are actually pneumonia deaths. I just heard a talk by Dr Bryan Ardis about this very thing, although other people have been pointing this out for years. Lumping pneumonia deaths in with flu deaths makes many people think they need a flu shot. A study done a few years ago at Walter Reed found that getting a flu shot can increase your risk by 36% of getting other respiratory illnesses. Also keep in mind that many people who think they have the flu really have a different respiratory virus. They don’t test everyone who thinks they have to flu to see if they really have the flu, but they can get counted as flu cases.
Backs up my personal anecdotal evidence- husband: flu shot mandated for work: gets flu every time, me- sleeps next to guy, doesn’t get flu shot, doesn’t get flu. Dr says “would have been worse flu without the shot”. Cant prove a negative.
How many other medicines are approved, used widely, have potential side effects, and do not work?
Flu deaths are just estimates. There's no widespread testing. So..
Berenson always dropping truth bombs 💣
So, if the flu shots do not result in a discernable improvement in healthy outcomes, why has it become a standard component of routine healthcare? Who benefits from a vaccination that does nothing to change the outcome?
Those are rhetorical questions - just follow the money.
FDA just approved five doses. Why does pharma even bother? We all know how this works.
Put another way, "As long as they don't know the vaccines are unsafe and ineffective, they can continue to insist they are safe and effective." If I am supposed to trust the science, shouldn't science be all about the truth, especially when it comes to public health. Too many have fallen for the Big Lie and our best weapon is the truth. "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free." Stay strong and free!
There is a graph in this article that shows that influenza mortality increased after vaccination was introduced. Your graph did not show that. https://circleofmamas.com/health-news/cdc-made-up-80000-flu-deaths-to-push-flu-shots/
Cochrane reports have looked at the very few clinical trials for the flu shot and have found little to no efficacy or maybe a trend to efficacy. Some trials also show thAt annual flu shots do weaken immunity over time. As a healthcare worker I fought them every year til I retired. As a Medical Director I refused to mandate flu shots or masks in lieu of flu shot and fought my hospital leadership til basically it was time to go or get fired. As a former industrial hygienist I understood the limits of masks years ago. As a happy retiree I stay as far away from the algorithm-driven health care as possible.
The ongoing Covid vaccine jihad and massive public dishonesty campaign had a predecessor. History seems to always repeat itself. Thank you for providing data to cement what I had long suspected: Flu shots are a near-complete waste of time and money, driven by Group Think.
Well stated as usual Alex. I've usually gotten the flu shot because it seems to be quite low risk for side effects and maybe it helps a little? This data pretty much confirms it really doesn't help. In the future I think I'll skip the inconvenience of a pointless stop at Walgreens.
Let us not forget the influenza strains that may be popular are predicted 3-5 years out. It's why the vaccines don't work all that well; mainly because the populace isn't introduced to the predicted strains. Vaccinated patients may be hospitalized or die because they caught a different strain. It's been made crystal clear the CDC et al are not prognosticators. Like, bigly.
Thank you for answering a question I have been hearing from others but did not have any data to support an answer, do influenza vaccines really work? You are right that flu vaccines do not demonstrate any level of effectiveness, and am not surprised but I am disappointed that this appears to be the case. I am old enough to remember going to the local high school and getting a sugar cube that contained the Sabin polio vaccine. At the time, it seemed cool to a little kid to get in line and get sugar cubes! I just read a book on Polio and as it turns out Polio was never really the epidemic that it was portrayed either. Most kids got a type of Polio that they most likely did not even notice and got natural life time immunity to all Polio types, but the poor kids that needed leg braces, and the pathetic iron lung pics that got the ball rolling, with FDR being the poster child. I guess we must be completely skeptical of everything. It is a pathetic what this has all come down to.
Alex wrote:
"As long as they don’t know the vaccines are useless, they can continue to insist they are useful - and that the only problem is that not enough people have received them."
My opinion, as informed as it may or may not be, is that history will show the 2020-era mRNA flu shots were not useless, but HARMFUL. I don't think it hyperbolic to speculate that a decade from now we may be talking about "COVID Vaccines" like we do today about DES (diethylstilbestrol).
The ineffectiveness of the flu vaccine has been known to researchers for ~15-20 years. Here are 3 peer-reviewed studies from respected journals that highlight the phenomenon:
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-3075
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(07)70236-0/fulltext
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/486407
A couple months ago I raised this topic with my primary care provider. It did not go well.
An honest Geriatric internal medicine doctor will tell you that >65 give you zero protection from catch the flu that season. Because most of the time they make the wrong formula that was planned for that season. And most already have natural immunity for life anyways. Now with these latest mRNA shot who they focused so much on the elderly when you see the numbers of deaths from previous years you will see they have done far more harm than good. Other words you cut the lifetime of your loved ones. Dont forget people like Berenson had to wear many hats for the past 2 years where most patients could not have family or loved ones visiting the ones, he has cared for the mental wear toll that it puts on you. This is something that most have no clue or experienced. There is a lot of hurting people here in America and the media ignoring the truth and all the lies they have told talking about WW3 is never going to fix the damages they have created and have done to millions.
We need studies on all the shots! 54% of our kids are chronically ill. Autism is now 1 in 37. If it keeps going at its current rate we will be at 1 in 2 kids by 2030. This is the real pandemic.
RFK Jr for President or at least Secretary of HHS.
And all of our great scientists forget about the elementary chemical concept of synergy. That's where combining two chemicals or shots can get you an entirely different third chemical or effect. Did they test the synergy of giving you the flu shot with the covid shot? Of course not.
Oh and did you know that they never bothered to test the covid shot for cancer or genotoxicity? Or reproductive harm? Yah, the rats don't breed fast enough. But with tens of thousands of woman complaining about menstrual cycle irregularities, we know that reproduction is affected.
Start a whisper campaign: The covid 19 vaccine was never tested for cancer. And the whistleblowing doctors from the military are saying that cancer is up 300% according to their database (before it was tampered with).
So the FDA committee on approving the shots for our babies meets April 6th. See the Toby Rogers substack for info. Save our babies!!
We do NOT 'adjust' data (except perhaps economic, where it makes sense). Adjusted data is not data. At best it is an approximation. At worst, it is an attempt to fit observation to theory (instead of the other way around).
I would be able to break down the efficacy of the flu vaccine by all those factors if they gave me the raw data and the raw data supported that breakdown (i.e. if there were the appropriate and consistent fields associated with age, smoker status, ...). It really shouldn't be too hard. Usually, the hardest thing about this type of analysis is trying to understand their data format. I did that kind of crap for over 40 years for the DoD. It is possible that they just didn't look at the efficacy but that would be idiotic. My guess is that they did look and just didn't like the results. They didn't want to encourage vaccine hesitancy.
The was really “useful” for me Alex, thank you. Plus Medicare irritatingly keeps reminding me to get a flu shot, I stopped my yearly flu vaccines starting last year (HATED the side effects of feeling sick & sore 3 days). I’ll take my chances fending off ALL the viruses on my own now.
Illness is with multiple factors and impacts, as is treatment. You can put 100 people in a room and expose them to the same quantity of an infectious pathogen, and there could be as many as 100 different responses.
So, you can’t compare the 80 year old woman to the eight-year-old boy, nor can you compare the 30 year old husband to the 32-year-old wife, and certainly you can’t compare the intellectually disordered person to a rocket scientist.
At the end of the day, if you let nonclinical people define how an illness attacks and disrupts and diminishes a population, you won’t get the right answers. They may have non-medical perspectives that could provide some insight to factors that can aggravate the illness as well as impact on treating it, but, I don’t tell politicians how to legislate, besides creating laws that are only gonna fuck up mine and other peoples lives while these scumbags running the country are completely unaffected!…
So, here’s the tip, if you give somebody a treatment intervention and it’s working minimally or less effectively at least 20 or more percent of the time, you should be cautious, reluctant, and suspicious.
This “vaccine“ or “inoculation“ is not grounded in reality, it’s about money prestige and in the end, I think genocide.
Talk amongst yourselves…
Interesting article. https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/8/3/ofab069/6129135
"Evidence suggests that repeated influenza vaccination may reduce vaccine effectiveness (VE)." Well, so much for that annual flu shot!
Worth reading the PDF of the study included in the link, e.g.:
"It has been suggested that the protection conferred by influenza vaccine in a season could prevent the natural immunity from exposure to circulating influenza viruses, and may therefore increase the risk of infection and impact VE in subsequent seasons [7]."
Ohhhhh....
Running potable water, good sanitation systems, exercise, good diet, and eschewing pharmaceutical poisons and 24/7 propaganda streams seem to be the most effective preventives against most diseases, including mental health disorders.
Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History https://dissolvingillusions.com
I have been talking about this exact subject. Where’s the control group/the placebo group? For both flu and Covid. The public deserves the real data.
I think they use the same relative efficacy when talking about flu shots as Covid shots rather than absolute efficacy. That always makes a difference to actual real world efficacy of these shots. When you look at absolute efficacy I think they are not so helpful if I can recall rightly. A whole ton of people need to get shots to save one person from hospitalization and death.
Given that we are dealing with government agencies notorious for manipulating the data as it pleases to advance a wicked agenda, and a pharmaceutical industry that effectively owns those government agencies, keeping in mind that Pfizer has been effectively operating a continuing criminal enterprise at least since 2004 and 2009, how can the data we see be considered valid?
"And it would give us a definitive answer. Within a few months after the end of flu season we would know - not guess, know - whether flu vaccines actually reduced flu deaths. " Ah Ha! Got you now Alex. Your study did not measure the critical - "but you got less sick" - measurement we use for the mRNA!! /s
I am 69 and have never had the flu and never had the vaccine. I take vit. C & zinc with d3 to inhance my immune system.
Forcing a drug company (like CDC, NIH, etc) to assess all cause mortality should happen for every product they push.
What is the basis for the number of flu deaths? Isn't it just an estimation? If yes, you would need to examine the bases for this estimation, too, right?
There are no “strains”. Perhaps you’re catching on (barely) that shots don’t make you healthy or protect you, instead they give you toxicity which can cause illness, symptoms, and death.