It’s Flu Shot Propaganda Season! Beware the Big Lies about the Vaccine.

Introduction

With the 2018 – 2019 flu season approaching, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is pushing out propaganda to increase demand for the pharmaceutical industry’s influenza vaccine products—and the mainstream media is naturally parroting the misinformation unthinkingly.

Take the Washington Post’s article from earlier this month titled “Flu can be a killer, but some refuse to take a shot”. As one can tell from the title, the message of the article is that people who choose not to be injected with the influenza vaccine are behaving irrationally.

The author even likens it to people who choose not to wear their seat belt while driving. There’s no reason not to just do it!

The underlying assumption being made here is that vaccination is a one-size-fits-all solution that is both safe and effective. We are supposed to believe that this is precisely what science tells us.

But that is unequivocally false.

Neither the CDC nor the media have any interest in properly informing the public about what science actually tells us about the influenza vaccine. Instead, they issue endless propaganda that only serves to misinform, as this article so aptly demonstrates.

Misleading the Public about Annual Flu Deaths

The first thing the Post tells us about the influenza virus is that it is responsible for hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths each year.

Last season, the Post says, an “estimated 600,000 people” were “hospitalized because of the flu”.

It adds, “In a recent report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said flu killed about 80,000 Americans in the 2017-2018 season, the most in decades. In other recent years death estimates have ranged from 12,000 to 56,000, according to the CDC.”

The Post repeats the CDC’s claims as though they were uncontroversially credible.

The truth is that the CDC’s estimates are highly controversial precisely because of their highly questionable credibility.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology stating that there is “substantial controversy” surrounding the CDC’s estimates.

So why is it that the fact that the CDC’s estimates are controversial is practically never relayed to the public by the mainstream media?

Is it that journalists and editors who work for the corporate media are aware of the great controversy and simply choose to deliberately deceive their audiences by withholding that highly relevant information?

Or is it that they are simply too irresponsible and lazy to do their homework and instead just take whatever the CDC puts out in its public relations messaging as gospel and relay it unthinkingly to their audience?

I don’t see any other possibilities. In the case of this particular author, I think it is the latter. It seems to me that Robyn Correll is totally convinced of her own propaganda.

Another thing you won’t learn from the Washington Post or other mainstream media is that the CDC engages in a deliberate strategy of using fear marketing to increase demand for its influenza vaccines.

Once again, you don’t need to take my word for this. At a workshop for the Institute of Medicine in 2004, the CDC presented a presentation that outlined a “‘Recipe’ for Fostering Public Interest and High Vaccine Demand”, which called explicitly for using fear marketing to do just that. It even bluntly stated that “Health literacy is a growing problem”.

Why? Because people who do their own research and make their own informed choices rather than blindly following the CDC’s recommendations are less likely to get the flu shot.

(And if you're thinking I must be too liberally interpreting, the specific context in which the CDC identified health literacy as an obstacle to be overcome in the pursuance of its aim of increasing demand for influenza vaccines was the fact that healthy adults widely—and rightly—recognize that they are not at high risk of serious complications from the flu. Read it for yourself and see!)

I won’t get into all the reasons why the CDC’s estimates are not credible because I’ve already written about it in detail in my article “How the CDC Uses Fear Marketing to Increase Demand for Flu Vaccines”. So you can read that for more information. (I also deal specifically with the CDC’s claim about last season’s flu-associated deaths in my post “80,000 Flu Deaths Last Season? Why the CDC’s Claim Is Not Credible.”)

For our purposes here, just understand that while the media relays the CDC’s claims as though solidly grounded in fact, its estimates are rather highly controversial precisely because they rest on numerous dubious assumptions.

To give you a quick idea, though, of the contrast between the actual data and the CDC’s alarming estimates, consider that the average number of deaths each year for which the cause is actually attributed on death certificates to influenza is not tens of thousands or even thousands, but little more than 1,000.

After unquestioningly relaying the CDC’s claims as though factual, the Post expresses puzzlement over why, therefore, fewer than half of Americans choose to get a flu shot—as though this was simply inexplicable and representative of completely irrational behavior!

Of course, just knowing the fact that the CDC’s claims about annual flu deaths are highly controversial already goes a long way toward explaining why people might choose not to get the influenza vaccine.

And there is a whole world of other information out there that the Post doesn’t offer its readers even the slightest glimpse into, but that would entirely dispel any puzzlement over it.

Anyone who bothers to actually research the medical literature for themselves to see what science actually tells us can easily understand how the choice not to get a flu shot can be perfectly rational.

The Washington Post simply has no interest in examining the actual science, much less informing its readers about it.

For starters, note that the assumption Correll and her Post editors are making is that vaccination is a one-size-fits-all solution. Everybody aged six months and up, including pregnant women, should get the flu shot, according to the CDC’s recommendation. Anyone who doesn’t follow this advice is simply making a wrong choice.

That’s what we’re told. But this is simply ignorant and utterly unscientific.

What we know from science, rather, is that the risk-benefit analysis of vaccination must be done for each vaccine and for each individual. And we also know that there are plenty of legitimate reasons why people might choose not to get a flu shot.

The underlying assumption behind the Post’s headline simply illustrates the ignorance of the author and the editorial board and highlights that it is they, not people who choose not to get the vaccine, who are being irrational and unscientific.