My doctor told me I should get the flu vaccine because the flu can kill people and by taking the vaccine, it will reduce your risk of death. That sounded compelling to me, so I always took the shot when offered.
I now realize that was a big mistake. I regret the error.
To solidify the point, I did a Twitter post recently asking if there was any evidence that anyone should get the flu vaccine.
There wasn’t anything compelling that came back showing I should get the flu vaccine. Are you surprised?
Instead, what I did get back was a lot of compelling evidence that would dissuade anyone from getting the flu vaccine. I think you’ll find the list very interesting!
The bottom line is you should never get any vaccine without first seeing the all-cause risk benefit data.
I rarely go to the @CDCgov Twitter account, but I checked it out today just to see the latest misinformation they are spreading. I’ve found it actually educational since you can often do extremely well by listening to what they advise and doing the opposite.
Here’s the most recent tweet:
So in other words, your risk of flu is now near zero, so plan right now to get a flu shot this fall. I wasn’t able to find the risk/benefit calculation for some reason. Still working on that.
So I posted this:
Where is the proof of efficacy for the flu vaccine? Explain to me how we can be having 30M cases of flu every year if the vaccines are working and creating herd immunity? Is that a success? Is there a recent large double-blind placebo controlled RCT showing flu vaccine efficacy?… pic.twitter.com/Fdo187PwjG
— Steve Kirsch (@stkirsch) May 6, 2023
Here is the study referenced in the tweet which admitted that for over 50 years, there were no studies showing the flu vaccine worked for healthcare workers.
From my Medicare article, check out this chart:
See the 475 deaths on day 0 of the flu shot? That’s impossible for a safe vaccine. It kills around 10 people per million which is 10X higher than what a safe vaccine is supposed to do. This is why the CDC doesn’t let anyone see the Medicare records. They keep them under lock and key.
So basically, there are the risks the CDC never tells you about. Is there a death benefit? No death benefit has ever been established.
So we’re pretty much done right there. No need to read further. But there’s more…
The responses I received on Twitter were also very enlightening.
My favorite response was from James Lyons-Weiler who pointed me to this study: Increased risk of noninfluenza respiratory virus infections associated with receipt of inactivated influenza vaccine which showed the flu vax makes you over 4X more likely to get infected with a non-influenza virus. The result is highly statistically significant. Isn’t that interesting? It reminds me of the COVID vaccine where they looked only at the change in COVID infections instead of looking at the change in anything else (like cancers, heart attacks, death, etc).
Did your doctor warn you about that???
Nobody provided any proof that flu vaccines worked.
There was one person claiming proof, but this does not use a DB RCT. It’s a correlation only. The Turtles book does an awesome job of explaining why this is flawed in their chapter on epidemiology. Basically, to show causality, you need to have a mechanism (which we do) and repeated correlations such as in different countries. The book is great because it gives excellent examples on how epidemiologists are not fooled by a single example like this one.
Here is proof of the efficacy of the flu vaccine:https://t.co/yGSTiDafML
— Wayne McDougall 🐀 (@waynemcdougall) May 7, 2023
So to show causation, it would have to be repeated in other countries at a minimum. But that isn’t the case as shown in the Our World In Data article.
I bet you cannot tell from the graph below which year they introduced the flu vaccine in the US. And that’s exactly the point.
My second favorite response was from Professor Norman Fenton who linked his video showing the vaccine trick that no health authority will dare explain. In his short video, he shows how the US and UK governments can make a vaccine with 0% efficacy appear to have an efficacy of 86% (2 week delay) or 94.4% efficacy (3 week wait for the vaccine to become effective). Did you realize this?
The ‘proof of efficacy’ of the flu vaccine is likely also based on this statistical illusion https://t.co/4TVD6Ih9Rh
— Prof Norman Fenton (@profnfenton) May 6, 2023
My third favorite linked to the Cochrane review of the flu for older adults saying the infection risk reduction benefit of 58% was based on low-quality evidence and there was basically no reliable data on a hospitalization or mortality benefit. They wrote:
The study providing data for mortality and pneumonia was underpowered to detect differences in these outcomes.
In short, my doctor did not convey accurate information to me at all.
