Should You Get the Flu Shot Every Year? Don’t Ask the New York Times.

Introduction

The way the US mainstream media typically frame the issue of vaccines, you are essentially either a firm advocate of public vaccine policy, or you are “anti-science”. The media applies the derogatory label “anti-vaxxer” to all those who dare question the wisdom of the vaccine recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The result is that there is no serious discussion being had today about vaccines in the mainstream discourse.

And there is a discussion to be had. Journalists have a moral duty to properly inform the public about critically important issues such as this one. Yet the mainstream media have disgracefully failed to do so. Not only do establishment media organizations like the New York Times and Washington Post fail to educate, but they systematically misinform readers about vaccines.

If there is just one thing about the vaccine issue that you need to understand, it is arguably this: What public health officials and the media say science says about vaccines and what science actually tells us about vaccine safety and effectiveness are two completely different things.

A recent New York Times article titled “Why It’s Still Worth Getting a Flu Shot” provides an instructive example. In it, Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine and regular Times blogger, argues that science tells us the answer to the question of whether you should get an annual flu shot is unambiguously “Yes”. As Carroll tells it, the science shows that the influenza vaccine is extraordinarily safe, and therefore even in years such as this one when officials admit the vaccine is highly ineffective, it still confers a great benefit to society.[1]

The lesson we are supposed to learn is that we should strictly adhere to the CDC’s recommendation that everyone aged six months and up should get a flu shot every year.

However, in order to lead his readers to this desired conclusion, Carroll greatly deceives them about what science has to say about the safety and effectiveness of the influenza vaccine—including by grossly misrepresenting his own sources from the medical literature. Apart from his sources contradicting his claims, Carroll pretends as though there isn’t a huge and growing body of scientific evidence that, if widely known to the public, would shake the very foundations of the government’s public vaccine policy.

What is happening with the vaccine debate in the mainstream discourse is that the establishment media is dutifully performing its usual function of manufacturing consent for government policy.[2] Contrary to what the New York Times tells the public, what the existing science tells us about the influenza vaccine is that government policy effectively treats the entire US population—including infants, pregnant women, and the elderly—as the subjects of a mass uncontrolled experiment with potentially disastrous outcomes.

How This Year’s Flu Shot Is “Particularly Ineffective”

Carroll begins his Times article by acknowledging that this year’s influenza vaccine “is particularly ineffective”, which naturally “has had many people wondering if they should still get a flu shot.” He then dutifully offers readers the reassurance, “If you read no further in this column, know this: The answer is yes, you should still get a flu shot.”

For context, he explains that the virus is “unstable”, meaning that “it changes a lot each season. This means that the immunity you gained from a shot a year ago doesn’t work so well this time around. Each summer, scientists gather and try to make a best guess on which variants are going to be more common in the coming year. They look at data from countries like Australia (whose flu season comes before ours), then they make the shot to match.”

“This season,” Carroll notes, “the flu vaccine is most protective against an H1N1, an H3N2 and a B/Victoria lineage strain. Some vaccines also protect against a B/Yamagata lineage strain.” (The former are known as “trivalent” while the latter are “quadrivalent” influenza vaccines.)

While Carroll doesn’t disclose what he means, specifically, when he admits that this year’s vaccine is “particularly ineffective”, he does cite a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that gives us the answer.

That paper’s authors looked at the situation this year in Australia in order to make predictions for the United States; and the situation seen in Australia isn’t good. They noted that the dominant strain in Australia has been an Influenza A(H3N2) variant, and even though this year’s vaccine is specifically designed to protect against this strain, it had an estimated effectiveness of “only 10%.”

But the vaccine’s admitted ineffectiveness is only part of the story. As Carroll’s source also noted, there was “mounting concern” in Australia, “with record-high numbers of laboratory-confirmed influenza” and “higher-than-average numbers of hospitalizations and deaths.” In fact, despite the Australian government’s expensive mass vaccination campaign, the number of confirmed influenza cases reported this year was “215,280 by mid-October, far exceeding the 59,022 cases reported during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic”. (Emphasis added.)[3]

Now, that’s highly relevant data that surely could help readers make a more informed choice about whether it’s worth getting the flu shot. But rather than relaying it, Carroll understatedly writes that, “In any year, even when you’re vaccinated, you can get the flu. The shot is about reducing your risk, not eliminating it. Still, even when the flu vaccine is ‘less effective,’ it’s a good bet.”[4]

As will be demonstrated to you through the course of this multi-part exposé, that conclusion depends on the assumption that the figure of 215,280 cases of confirmed influenza would be even higher if it wasn’t for Australian government’s mass vaccination campaign. However, this is a dangerous assumption to make, and science gives us good reason to believe that this disastrous outcome did not happen despite mass vaccination, but as a consequence of public vaccine policy.

As economist Milton Friedman famously observed, “Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”[5] This is an essential point to keep in mind as you proceed into this case study.