Swine Flu Shot Safety Program

From Mike Adams’ recent editorial…

In the world of medicine, “skeptics” claim to be the sole protectors of intellectual truth. Everyone who disagrees with them is just a quack, they insist. Briefly stated, “skeptics” are in favor of vaccines, mammograms, pharmaceuticals and chemotherapy. They are opponents of nutritional supplements, herbal medicine, chiropractic care, massage therapy, energy medicine, homeopathy, prayer and therapeutic touch.

But there’s much more that you need to know about “skeptics”…

What skeptics really believe

I thought it would be interesting to find out exactly what “skeptics” actually believe, so I did a little research and pulled this information from various “skeptic” websites. [Read more →]

The swine flu outbreak was a ‘false pandemic’ driven by drug companies that stood to make billions of pounds from a worldwide scare, a leading health expert has claimed.

Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, accused the makers of flu drugs and vaccines of influencing the World Health Organization’s decision to declare a pandemic.

This led to the pharmaceutical firms ensuring ‘enormous gains’, while countries, including the UK, ’squandered’ their meager health budgets, with millions being vaccinated against a relatively mild disease.

[Read more →]

From today’s news:

(Lakshmi Singh) There’s been a dramatic increase in the number of people who’ve died from the new H1N1 swine flu. It’s not that the flu has suddenly become more deadly–the estimates are just more “precise”. NPR’s Joanne Silberner has more.

(Joanne Silberner) Last week the pediatric death count was 129, between late April and mid-October. This week the estimate is 540 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new estimate comes from the same numbers–tallies by select doctors and hospitals–but it takes into account that not all flu deaths are identified as such. Sometimes a flu test isn’t done, or it’s wrong, or the death is attributed to a different infection that came after the flu.

“We will decide who has the flu!”

The Austrian politician Karl Lueger was notorious for his politically expedient racism. As mayor of Vienna, Lueger was fond of anti-Semitic rhetoric, even though his own frequent dinner companions were Jewish. He dismissed this logical incongruity with the statement, “I will decide who is a Jew!”

Today, the CDC seems to employ similar tactics. Quoting their press release:

The estimated ranges of cases, hospitalizations and deaths generated by this [new] method provide a sense of scale in terms of the burden of disease caused by 2009 H1N1. It may never be possible to validate the accuracy of these figures. The true number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths may lie within the range provided or it’s also possible that it may lie outside the range.

Why is it impossible to validate the accuracy of infection figures? The CDC advised states to stop testing for H1N1 in July, reported CBS News.

When CBS News analyzed the state-by-state test results from the months prior to July, they found that the vast majority of “swine flu” cases were misdiagnosed.

So…after refusing for months to cooperate with the CBS investigation (as required by the Freedom of Information Act), how does the CDC finally respond to this stunning news? By inflating their own faulty estimates!

From “Influenza vaccination: policy versus evidence” by Tom Jefferson:

Each year enormous effort goes into producing influenza vaccines for that specific year and delivering them to appropriate sections of the population. Is this effort justified?

…I searched for relevant systematic reviews when updating and expanding the Clinical Evidence chapter on influenza (see bmj.com)—evidence was plentiful. Whenever possible, I chose evidence gathered in the optimal circumstances (for inactivated vaccines)—high viral circulation and a good match between the viral antigen and the vaccine.

Three problems are immediately apparent. The first is heavy reliance on non-randomised studies (chiefly cohort studies), especially in the elderly. This makes assessment of methodological quality an important part of data interpretation. For example, of 40 datasets assessing the effects of influenza vaccines in elderly people in institutions, only 26 reported data on viral types in circulation and only 21 gave information on vaccine content. Insufficient data were available in 11 of 17 retrospective studies of elderly people in institutions to allow reviewers to assess the authors’ claim of “high” or “epidemic” viral circulation. A metaanalysis of inactivated vaccines in elderly people showed a gradient from no effect against influenza or influenza-like illness to a large effect (up to 60%) in preventing all-cause mortality. These findings are both counterintuitive and implausible, as other causes of death are far more prevalent in elderly people even in the winter months. It is impossible for a vaccine that does not prevent influenza to prevent its complications, including admission to hospital.

[Read more →]

This long-lost episode shows how the Federation dealt with their own swine flu pandemic:

Swine Flu Safety Program on Youtube

Excerpts from the recent Council on Foreign Relations meeting on influenza policy:

LAURIE GARRETT: There’s a great deal of uncertainty about this flu pandemic. One thing is certain: It is a worldwide event, and it is occurring in the dawn of our age of globalization.

With us today is a stellar group of scientists — some of them PCAST members, as I said — analysts, journalists, and, as usual at the Council on Foreign Relations, a highly diverse and intelligent audience.

JON COHEN: If you look at the virulence here, there was a great deal of hand-wringing at the World Health Organization about whether to declare this a pandemic, and it came down to the fact that pandemic doesn’t really reflect severity. And so this wasn’t as severe as the H5N1 bird flu, which maybe killed 50 to 60 percent of the people it infects.

And so now the question has become, why bother getting vaccinated? And you even hear a lot of public figures standing up saying that they’re not going to do it. I will state my bias. I have two younger boys who both have been vaccinated against H1N1 and I’m very happy about that. But I’m curious what you think. Would you get vaccinated, and do you think your family, your colleagues should get vaccinated?

PETER PALESE: Maybe let me start this one out. So even though I mentioned that this 2009 novel influenza virus is really like a regular seasonal influenza virus in many of its characteristics, that doesn’t mean that I underestimate influenza. Regular seasonal influenza is a very bad disease. And we all know that in the U.S. alone we have about 30,000 deaths and we have about 200,000 hospitalizations every year.

So regular flu is a very serious disease and therefore we should really use all the tools we have to combat and to fight the regular flu, and that includes vaccination. And by the same token I think it is really compelling that we should use the vaccines which are being produced and being distributed right now against the 2009 virus. So, by not taking the vaccine, by underestimating this disease, I think we are not helping us.

COHEN: Any dissent?

LONE SIMONSEN: No. I mean, it’s very clear that vaccination is the best defense we have against pandemic influenza. In fact, when you have a pandemic unfolding and really high transmission rates, it becomes very hard to mitigate with any other strategy than that.

So, from a personal point of view, I have the advantage of natural immunity at this point, I’m pretty sure…our whole family experienced [the flu]…but I would still get the vaccine because what’s not to love?

What’s not to love, doctor? You mean aside from the toxic ingredients in the shot, their known side-effects, and the media-induced panic that seeks to prevent any serious public dialogue around this issue? [Read more →]

If you’ve been diagnosed “probable” or “presumed” 2009 H1N1 or “swine flu” in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu.

In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all. That’s according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation.

In short, only a small fraction of cases that doctors flagged as most likely to be swine flu actually tested positive for swine flu in state labs. The vast majority of the cases were negative…
[continued]

State-by-state results:
Florida – 8853 specimens – 83% negative for any flu
California – 13704 specimens – 86% negative for any flu
Alaska – 722 specimens – 93% negative for any flu
Georgia – 3117 specimens – 97% negative for swine flu

Untested? No.

Rushed into production? Not really.

Full of substances that do harm? Hardly, and especially not compared to the dangers of the H1N1 flu virus.

That is the retort of researchers, scientists, federal health authorities and others familiar with how swine-flu vaccine is made, as they listen — at times with disbelief — to the debate about it unfolding around kitchen tables and over the Internet.

They hear the arguments — about what’s in the vaccine, whether it was made too quickly, whether there are side effects — all the while frustrated that decades of experience in making effective flu vaccines hasn’t resulted in more public confidence that they got this right, too.

So begins William Mullen’s photocopied press release investigative report on the safety and efficacy of the swine flu virus. While bemoaning the lack of public confidence in the vaccine, Mullen and his quoted experts carefully avoid the facts that fuel and justify public doubt.

In the absence of any such facts, judgments on vaccine effectiveness are purely a matter of trust. And who would you rather trust, Mullen implies: our senior government health officials, or some random Internet conspiracy theorist?

Rubbish. Here at the Swine Flu Shot Safety Program, we believe you are smart enough to know all the facts, and draw your own conclusions. Below, we quote Mullen’s story, along with some troubling details he failed to mention. [Read more →]

WASHINGTON–In a televised appeal, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Baxter urged all Americans to vaccinate their houseplants against the H1N1 influenza, or swine flu.

Although there is currently no evidence that plants can be afflicted by the flu, Baxter warned that further mutations of the virus could have unpredictable effects. [Read more →]

Studies have shown flu vaccines to be largely ineffective, but the CDC and American Medical Association don’t want you to know it. From “Does the Vaccine Matter?” by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer:

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 War II. 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.” [Read more →]