Interview: Flu Shot Mandates and the CDC vs. the Science

On Friday, August 28, I had the pleasure of speaking with Michelle Malkin on her livestream program #MalkinLive about the Massachusetts government’s new mandate for all students to receive a flu shot. We discuss public relations claims about the influenza vaccine versus the scientific evidence and delve into a broad range of topics related to public vaccine policy, including efforts to censor and malign anyone who dares to question, dissent from, or criticize vaccine policy rather than addressing parents’ legitimate concerns.

Here is an overview of topics we discussed along with some links to articles where I provide supporting documentation:

• The rationale for Massachusetts’ new flu shot mandate for all students and the assumptions underlying the CDC’s influenza vaccine recommendation
• What the science actually tells us about the safety and effectiveness of influenza vaccines, including how Cochrane systematic reviews and meta-analyses have found that the CDC’s assumptions are unsupported by scientific evidence
• How the most recent Cochrane review on influenza vaccination of children found overall that four out of five who get the shot receive no benefit; that the vaccine confers no significant protection to children under age six; that the data is too limited to draw meaningful conclusions for children under age three; and that for children under age two, there is no evidence of effectiveness and only one thirty-year-old study on safety
• How the CDC uses fear marketing to increase demand for flu shots
• How vaccination comes at the opportunity cost of the superior immunity conferred by infection, which has the added benefit of conferring protection not only against the infecting strain but also other strains of influenza, and how therefore getting a flu shot each year might actually increase the risk of illness from emergent strains of influenza
• How the 1976 pandemic swine flu vaccine increased the risk of Guillain Barré Syndrome (GBS) while the forewarned pandemic never even occurred, and how this episode illustrates the dangers of rushing new influenza vaccines to market every single year without proper safety studies
• How vaccine mandates violate the right to informed consent and why so many people are willing to surrender or advocate against this fundamental human right
• How vaccines have “non-specific effects”, and how the claim that any vaccine is “safe and effectiveness” is meaningless absent randomized placebo-controlled studies comparing long-term health outcomes, including mortality, of large populations of individuals who received the vaccine and individuals who did not
• How synergistic effects of vaccines are rarely considered, including the fact that, as the Institute of Medicine pointed out in a 2013 review, studies designed to determine the long-term effects of vaccinating children according to the CDC’s routine schedule have not been done
• How public vaccine policy apologists argue that to do such studies would be “unethical”, and how this therefore essentially means they regard as “ethical” treating the entire childhood population as subjects of a mass uncontrolled experiment
• How the CDC relies primarily on observation studies for its claims of safety, which types of studies are prone to selection bias including “healthy user bias”
• How, for example, the CDC has claimed that elderly people who get a flu shot are less likely to die that coming flu season when in fact, as other researchers have shown, what was really happening was that elderly people who were so sick and frail that they were likely to soon die were less likely to get a flu shot
• How the CDC claims that it’s safe for pregnant women to get a flu shot based on observational studies (which in fact do not support the CDC’s claims, though I neglected to mention that important piece of information in the interview), not randomized controlled trials, from which pregnant women are generally excluded and which have not been done in the US
• How the CDC similarly claims that the ethylmercury in multi-dose vials of influenza vaccine is rapidly eliminated from the body without causing toxicity while its own cited studies in fact acknowledge it as a known neurotoxin that accumulates in the brain
• The difference between Thimerosol, the mercury-based preservative still contained in flu shots, and vaccine “adjuvants” such as aluminum
• How for the purposes of vaccine licensure the FDA essentially engages in scientific fraud by frequently using antibody titer as a surrogate measure of immunity despite the fact that antibodies are neither always sufficient nor even necessary for the development of immunity
• How, indeed, influenza vaccine manufacturers note in their package inserts that specific antibody titers “have not been correlated with protection from influenza illness”
• The different immune responses elicited by live versus non-live vaccines, and how the latter have been associated with detrimental non-specific effects
• How the DTP vaccine is associated with an increased rate of childhood mortality
• How the WHO has sponsored a malaria vaccine trial in African children despite earlier trial data showing the vaccine to be associated with an increased risk of death that was particularly pronounced for girls — and without informing parents of that risk
• How a Gates Foundation-funded HPV vaccine campaign in India had similarly been criticized for failure to obtain informed consent
• How the Philippines government rolled out a dengue vaccine upon the recommendation of the WHO despite trial data indicating that the vaccine would increase the risk of severe dengue disease in children with no prior infection
• How efforts to develop a vaccine for SARS were hampered by the same phenomenon of “immune enhancement”, whereby vaccinated animals were at an increased risk of the very disease the vaccine was intended to protect against
• How manufacturers of vaccines recommended by the CDC for routine use in children have broad legal immunity against injury lawsuits under a 1986 law that also established the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which effectively shifts the financial burden for vaccine injuries away from the pharmaceutical industry and onto the taxpaying consumers
• How the government recognizes that vaccines can cause encephalopathy, and how under the VICP the government has acknowledged that, in susceptible children, vaccines can cause brain damage manifesting as symptoms of autism
• How, to support its claim that “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism”, the CDC cites observational studies and an Institute of Medicine report that notes that such studies cannot rule out the hypothesis and acknowledged that none of the reviewed studies were even designed to test the hypothesis that vaccines administered according to the CDC’s routine childhood schedule can contribute to the development of autism in susceptible individuals
• How scientists study the phenomenon of “vaccine hesitancy” not to be able to substantively address parents’ legitimate concerns about vaccines but to try to produce more effective propaganda to get them to comply with the CDC’s recommendations
• How the label of “conspiracy theorist” is used to quash any serious discussion of vaccines, but how no conspiracy theory is required to explain how it can be that the government, the medical establishment, and the mainstream media are systematically misinforming the public about vaccine safety and effectiveness; this is rather explainable by institutionalized biases and how the media serve the function of manufacturing consent for government policies, doing policy advocacy rather than journalism
• How public vaccine policy treats vaccination as a one-size-fits-all solution to disease prevention despite the science being unequivocal that the risk-benefit analysis must be done for each vaccine and each individual, which requires knowledge about every individual that policymakers in Washington, DC, or state capitals do not have
• Why I think that voting perpetuates rather than helps to resolve the problems we are faced with, including the threat posed to both our health and liberty by vaccine mandates
• How studies have associated flu shots with an increased risk of infection with common human coronaviruses, and why the hypothesis that they might do the same for severe COVID-19 is biologically plausible

Here are the four installments of my influenza vaccine exposé that Michelle mentions:

• Should You Get the Flu Shot Every Year? Don’t Ask the New York Times.
• How the CDC Uses Fear and Deception to Sell More Flu Vaccines
• How You’re Being Lied to about the Risks of Getting a Flu Vaccine Annually
• The CDC’s Criminal Recommendation for a Flu Shot During Pregnancy

At the end of the interview, Michelle kindly complimented my work by saying, “I just think you’re an incredible, terrific independent journalist and I hope people will support your work at JeremyRHammond.com.”

If you’d like to support my truly independent journalism, make a financial contribution here.

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