Flu Shot Fails to Protect Seniors and May Increase Miscarriages by Dr. Joseph Mercola for Mercola
GNN Note – We are not fans of vaccines. If you think vaccines are good and healthy please do not force me or my family to abide by your thoughts. If you and your family are vaccinated – you ARE PROTECTED FROM THE UN-VACCINATED – or do you not trust the vaccines?
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Flu season is creeping up on us again and there are widespread calls to get your annual flu shot, despite the fact that, year after year, this strategy turns out to have an abysmal rate of effectiveness across the board. One group that consistently turns out to draw the short end of the stick when it comes to influenza vaccine failures is the elderly. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data have repeatedly demonstrated that the flu vaccine does not work for seniors.
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Pregnant women are another group that should carefully evaluate the risks and failures of influenza vaccine. The CDC recommends routine flu shots for women during any trimester in every pregnancy, but some scientific evidence suggests it could place their pregnancies at risk.
I’ve written many articles questioning the scientific basis for routine influenza vaccination in general. Here, my focus is the elderly and pregnant women, as there is scientific evidence detailing risks of flu vaccination for both groups.
First, though, I want to remind you of a little-known fact about influenza mortality estimates: Secondary infections such as pneumonia and other respiratory diseases, as well as sepsis,1 are included in “flu death” statistics, and account for a majority of deaths attributed to influenza every year.
Beware of Sepsis
As discussed in a Health magazine article2 published 2018, the symptoms of sepsis can actually mimic influenza symptoms — with disastrous results. In this particular case, a strep infection progressed to sepsis, which presented as influenza and, unfortunately, led to the amputation of the woman’s arms and legs. She says:3
“… if you have a fever that doesn’t go away or your body temperature is abnormally low, you have signs of any type of infection (whether it’s a cold or a UTI) that’s not getting better, you feel confused, or are in a lot of pain, go to your doctor and ask about sepsis.”
To learn more about sepsis and its treatment, see “Recognizing the Signs and Symptoms of Sepsis” and “Sepsis Is a Top Cause of Death in Hospitals.” It’s worth finding out about a relatively new sepsis treatment using intravenous vitamin C, hydrocortisone and thiamine, discussed in these articles.
The treatment has been shown to be extremely effective — far more so than conventional treatments — but many hospitals have yet to make it routinely available, which means it can be difficult to convince them to use it. It’s worth a try, though.
Why Is the Flu Vaccine so Ineffective?
It’s important to remember that the influenza vaccine contains only three or four type A or B vaccine strain influenza viruses, of which there are hundreds. So, even if those vaccine strain viruses are a perfect match for influenza viruses that are circulating in a given flu season, the vaccine does not prevent the majority of other respiratory infections that make people sick and often mistake for influenza unless lab testing is done.4
Twice a year, the World Health Organization issues recommendations on the composition of the upcoming season’s flu vaccines. For the 2019/2020 season, trivalent vaccines distributed in the U.S. will contain:5,6,7
- A/Brisbane/02/2018 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus
- A/Kansas/14/2017 (H3N2)-like virus
- B/Colorado/06/2017-like (Victoria lineage) virus
Quadrivalent vaccines will contain the three above, plus B/Phuket/3073/2013-like (Yamagata lineage) virus. The selected strains for this year are anticipated to improve coverage. In Australia, where the flu season got an early start in the Southern Hemisphere, health officials told people to get vaccinated because it could be an unusually severe season.8 The predominant influenza viruses circulating in Australia this year have been H3N2 influenza A virus followed by influenza B virus.9
In the U.S., health officials have said that the selection of influenza viruses for inclusion in the vaccine this year occurred later than usual. There are reports that flu vaccine production and shipments have been delayed and there will a shorter window of opportunity to get vaccinated.10
A study11 published in 2018 sheds some much-needed light on unvaccinated individuals at risk for influenza and how as many as half of unvaccinated people infected with influenza do not know they have it. Researchers found that “approximately 1 in 5 unvaccinated children and 1 in 10 unvaccinated adults were estimated to be infected by seasonal influenza annually, with rates of symptomatic influenza roughly half of these estimates.”
