How You’re Being Lied to about the Risks of Getting a Flu Vaccine Annually

Introduction

Every year as the “flu season” approaches, the public is inundated with messages from the government and media about the importance of getting an annual flu shot. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that the influenza vaccine be given to everyone aged six months and up, including pregnant women. According to the CDC, the influenza vaccine is safe, effective, and even “the best way” to prevent the flu. The media uncritically parrot the CDC’s claims to the public as though scientifically proven fact. But the reality is that what the government and media say science says about vaccines and what science actually tells us are two completely different things.

This is the third installment of a series of articles exposing influenza vaccine propaganda that serves to manufacture consent for public vaccine policy. In part one, using a case study from the New York Times, we saw how the mainstream media systematically deceive the public about the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. While The Times claims that science shows that the vaccine confers “a big payoff in public health”, its own source from the medical literature actually concluded that the CDC’s universal flu shot recommendation is unsupported by scientific evidence. While the Times claims that science has proven that harms from the vaccine are “almost nonexistent”, its own source from the medical literature actually highlighted the alarming lack of high quality safety studies and concluded that for young children such studies are “urgently required”. Furthermore, we saw how, by so deceiving its readers about what the science says, the Times was simply following the example of the CDC.[1]

In part two, we looked more closely at how the CDC uses fear and deception to increase market demand for the pharmaceutical industry’s influenza vaccine products. We saw how the CDC views increasing health literacy among the public as a problem—an obstacle to be overcome in order to meet its declared goal of increasing vaccination rates. We also examined how the media uncritically parrot as fact the CDC’s claims that every year hundreds of thousands of people are hospitalized and tens of thousands of people die because of the influenza virus, when the reality is that the CDC’s estimates are highly controversial because they are based on dubious assumptions and may greatly overinflate the numbers. Additionally, the CDC’s claims about the great effectiveness of the vaccine in reducing flu deaths among the elderly have been thoroughly discredited by the scientific community.[2]

In part one, we saw also how the CDC’s universal flu shot recommendation is based on the unsupported assumption that vaccination decreases transmission of the virus. But as we learned in part two, one recent study actually found that vaccination increases viral transmission, with vaccinated individuals shedding more than six times as much aerosolized virus in their breath than those who didn’t get a flu shot.

That same study also mentioned “recent literature suggesting reduced protection with annual vaccination” (emphasis added). In this third installment, we’ll take a look at that literature, and you’ll see that there is important scientific evidence that has been systematically concealed from the general public by the government and mainstream media.

The government serves the pharmaceutical industry rather than properly educating people so that they have the knowledge they need to make a truly informed decision about whether to vaccinate. And the establishment media serve the state by advocating public policy rather than doing journalism.

Part two also looked at the endemic corruption at the CDC and how public vaccine policy with its one-size-fits-all approach to disease prevention constitutes an all-out assault on the right to informed consent. Consequently, public policy represents a serious threat to both our health and our liberty.

In this third installment, we will dive much deeper into the question of vaccine safety. You will learn:

• How the media lie about the safety of the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule;
• Why claims that serious adverse events from the influenza vaccine are “rare” cannot be trusted, and how serious negative consequences could be far more common than publicly acknowledged;
• How public vaccine policy effectively treats the entire US population as the subjects of a mass uncontrolled experiment;
• How the government has prioritized the goal of maintaining public policy over the goal of bettering public health by granting the pharmaceutical industry legal immunity from vaccine injury lawsuits;
• How studies have found that the diphtheria, tetanus, and whole-cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine is associated with an increased risk of childhood death, and why the lessons from this are relevant to the question of whether you should get an annual flu shot;
• How studies have shown that getting an annual flu shot can actually increase your risk of illness and why this is so.

In a forthcoming fourth installment, we will continue to carefully examine the question of influenza vaccine safety, and you’ll learn how the CDC lies about the toxicity of the mercury that is contained in some flu shots, and why the CDC’s recommendation that pregnant women get a flu shot is criminally irresponsible.

If you have not already, please be sure to read the first two installments of this series because they contain important contextual information that you will need in order to get the most benefit out of reading this third installment:

Read Part 1: Should You Get the Flu Shot Every Year? Don’t Ask the New York Times.

Read Part 2: How the CDC Uses Fear and Deception to Sell More Flu Vaccines.

I am presenting the information in this third part of the series on the assumption that you already have the knowledge provided in the first two essays. So with that understood, let’s proceed.