Myths and Facts about Flu Shots

Introduction

It’s flu shot propaganda season again, so beware of government-sanctioned disinformation from your health care provider! As an example, take Munson Healthcare, a provider in my home state of Michigan, which directs patients to a “Myths and Facts” page of its website intended to overcome flu shot “hesitancy”, as any decision not to accept a vaccine is termed in the literature.

The underlying assumption behind research into “vaccine hesitancy” is that there are no legitimate reasons not to accept any vaccine recommended by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), apart from the CDC’s narrowly defined “contraindications” to vaccination, which don’t include conditions like having a mitochondrial disorder even though the US government has acknowledged that can be genetic predispositions children to vaccine injury.

The further assumption underlying this body of literature is that anyone who decides that it would not be in their own best interest to strictly comply with the CDC’s recommendations must simply be misinformed. It is axiomatic that nobody who understands how truly miraculous vaccines are could possibly make a rational decision not to get vaccinated.

The basic aim of the research into vaccine “hesitancy” is to try to figure out how to create more effective propaganda to delude people into compliance.

With every vaccine, you will see the same basic talking points repeated over and over regardless of whether the source is a “public health” official, a mainstream media outlet, a pharmaceutical company, or a healthcare provider.

Munson’s “Myths and Facts” page provides a useful summary of key propaganda claims about flu shots, so let’s take a look.

Myth: Flu Shots Cannot Increase Your Risk of Developing Flu-Like Illness

The first “myth” presented on the page is an excellent example of strawman argumentation. Munson correctly points out that it is untrue that “The Flu Shot Can Give You the Influenza Virus”. These are inactivated virus vaccines, not “live” virus vaccines, and therefore flu shots do not carry the same risk as live virus vaccines of causing an infection with vaccine-strain virus.

But who thinks that flu shots are live virus vaccines potentially capable of causing infection? I have deeply researched flu shots and vaccines in general, and I have spent years now deeply involved in the health freedom movement. I cannot exclude the possibility that instances have escaped my memory, but I do not recall ever having seen the claim spreading around that flu shots are live virus vaccines.

This particular talking point sets up a claim that at best is a piece of low-hanging fruit to deflect from the knowledge that people do rightly share with others that getting an annual flu shot can increase the risk of getting the flu.

Studies in Canada found that the receipt of the seasonal flu shot for the 2008–2009 season was associated with an increased risk of illness due to the novel strain of influenza A(H1N1) that emerged and was labeled a pandemic. It has been hypothesized that this effect was due to the phenomenon of “original antigenic sin”, whereby the immune systems of vaccinated people were fixated on generating responses to the seasonal strain rather than against the pandemic strain as would have occurred had they been immunologically naïve.

Original antigenic sin is also observed with influenza infection, but since natural immunity is superior, it still constitutes an opportunity cost of vaccination. People who didn’t get the seasonal flu shot had a relatively greater ability to mount appropriate immune responses to the pandemic strain.

Other studies support the hypothesis. A 2011 study in the Journal of Virology found that getting an annual flu shot hampers the development of the robust cell-mediated immunity that would otherwise be conferred by infection. The authors concluded that annual vaccination against influenza “may render young children who have not previously been infected with an influenza virus more susceptible to infection with a pandemic influenza virus of a novel subtype.”

A randomized, placebo-controlled trial published in 2012 in Clinical Infectious Diseases found that children who received the seasonal flu shot also had an increased risk of non-influenza infections in the nine months post-vaccination.

This is an example of what are termed in the literature “non-specific effects” of vaccines. Whereas a vaccine might confer some protection against the target pathogen, it might also detrimentally affect the immune system in such a way as to make the individual more susceptible to other diseases.

A study by CDC researchers published in Clinical Infectious Diseases in 2014 found that the more that people had been vaccinated in prior years, the less effective the influenza vaccine was at preventing the most recent season’s dominant influenza A(H3N2) variant. The CDC researchers suggested that “exposure to influenza antigens can preferentially expand preexisting memory responses to historical virus antigens at the expense of de novo responses to the current vaccine or infecting strain. In most people, vaccination appears to boost preexisting memory responses against antigenically related, previously circulating strains.” They also remarked how their finding “raises relevant questions about the potential interference of repeated annual influenza vaccination and possible residual protection from previous season vaccination”.

A study published in the journal Vaccine in 2018 found that children who received a seasonal flu shot did not have a statistically significant decreased risk of influenza illness but did have an increased risk of non-influenza respiratory pathogens relative to unvaccinated children.

So, if you’ve ever developed flu-like symptoms after getting a flu shot, don’t let them tell you it’s all in your head. There really is data indicating that this could be an effect of the vaccine. This is a legitimate concern that people have, but the propagandists cannot acknowledge any legitimate concerns, so they deflect with their strawman argument about the shot not being a live virus vaccine.

Myth: Everybody Needs an Annual Flu Shot

It is axiomatic that if you didn’t get a seasonal flu shot and you got through flu season without getting the flu, then you didn’t need that flu shot. Despite this logical truism, Munson insists that it is a “myth” that “I’m Healthy and Never Get Sick, so I Don’t Need to Get a Flu Shot”. Munson insists matter-of-factly that healthy people who never get the flu still need to get a flu shot—as though these people do not have an immune system capable of doing the job for which it exists without this pharmaceutical intervention.

Munson argues that even extremely healthy people can get influenza, and that serious complications “can occur for anyone”. Munson’s conclusion that everyone needs a flu shot is nevertheless a non sequitur fallacy. It does not follow logically from the premise. To answer the question of whether this pharmaceutical product is needed requires an individualized risk-benefit analysis.

Munson is gaslighting people by denying this additional truism, ridiculously expressing an opinion as though some kind of scientific fact.

Additionally, Munson is asserting as fact that the vaccines have been proven to prevent serious complications from the flu. On the contrary, a 2010 systematic review and meta-analysis of the published literature on influenza vaccination of healthy adults found no evidence that flu shots reduced the risk of complications.

Relatedly, the fourth “Myth” Munson presents is that “Flu Vaccines are Just for Kids”. This is, of course, another invention. Nobody claims that flu shots are intended just for children. Everyone knows that flu shots are recommended by the CDC for everyone aged six months and up. All of us, regardless of age, are incessantly bombarded with the message that we need to get a flu shot, so we can hardly be unaware of the universality of the recommendation.

Here, Munson again claims that flu shots prevent missed workdays, hospitalizations, and death, without presenting any evidence to support those claims.

Myth: Flu Shots Stop Viral Transmission

Under the “Myth” that “Flu Vaccines are Just for Kids”, Munson also claims that flu shots stop transmission of influenza. Kids and adults alike, Munson asserts, should get the shot to “not only protect yourself but others around you” because “getting your flu shot helps stop the spread!”

In fact, as also observed in the 2010 systematic review, there is “no evidence that vaccines prevent viral transmission”. A 2018 study published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, PNAS, compared breath samples from people with influenza infection and found that people who had received both the current and previous season’s influenza vaccines shed over six times as much aerosolized virus as people who skipped the shots.

This speaks once again to the superiority of natural immunity.

As observed in a May 2021 article in Annals of Internal Medicine for which the senior author was none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President (bold emphasis added):

The distinction between immunity that protects a vaccinated person from developing symptomatic disease and immunity capable of also interrupting transmission of the virus from the vaccinated person is an important consideration for population immunity. This distinction is frequently lost in discussions about the collective societal responsibility to get vaccinated to reach an adequate level of population (herd) immunity to eliminate transmission. Failure to appreciate this distinction may lead to a false sense in vaccinees that they are protected from infection and thus cannot transmit to susceptible contacts. . . . Administration of parenterally administered vaccines alone typically does not result in potent mucosal immunity that might interrupt infection or transmission.

As noted in a 2004 paper on influenza vaccines in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, “parenteral immunization of the naïve host is not an effective means of stimulating mucosal immunity”. Vaccines administered via needles, note the authors of a 2017 paper in Clinical and Experimental Vaccine Research, bypass the natural route of infection whereby “most pathogens first infect mucosal surfaces”, resulting in development of mucosal immunity. This once again illustrates the need to consider superior natural immunity as an opportunity cost of vaccination.

In short, Munson attempts to persuade people to get a flu shot by simply lying that doing so will stop them from spreading the virus.

Myth: Flu Shots Are Very Effective

The next “Myth” Munson presents is curiously worded, “The Flu Shot Doesn’t Prevent Me from Getting Influenza. What’s the Point of Getting One?” The talking point presented here is evidently meant to gaslight people who understand that flu shots aren’t very effective at preventing influenza infection and disease.

Munson simply refuses to acknowledge this fact, allowing only that flu shots don’t “100% guarantee you won’t get influenza”, while insisting that flu shots are generally “very effective.”

In fact, flu shots are generally not very effective. As noted in a 2010 systematic review and meta-analysis of the published literature on influenza vaccination of healthy adults, in a typical flu season, 100 people need to be vaccinated for just one person to avoid influenza illness. To think of it another way, this means that 99 out of 100 people would not have developed the flu anyway had they never gotten the flu shot.

In fact, given the limited effectiveness of influenza vaccines, the review authors concluded that the data “seem to discourage the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure.”

A follow-up review published in 2018 observed that the evidence-base for the CDC recommendation remained inadequate, with data indicating an at best “modest” benefit, with possibly “a small effect in preventing the symptoms of influenza”. At best, during years when the vaccine formulation matched the circulating strain of influenza, the shots were 59% percent effective at preventing influenza, which translated into 71 people needing to get vaccinated to prevent a single case of the flu.

The estimated benefit in healthy adults was “a 1% lower risk of experiencing influenza over a single influenza season”, and the safety profile of the shots remained “uncertain”, which was “a reflection of the size of the evidence base.”

In case you’re wondering how well “public health” authorities have done at guessing which strains to include in the vaccines in recent years, here are a few headlines:

• 2018: “The flu shot offers lousy protection against this year’s worst strain. Blame eggs.”
• 2019: “The Flu Vaccine Might Be Mismatched, but You Still Need Your Shot”
• 2020: “This Year’s Flu Shot Doesn’t Match What’s Circulating. Here’s What That Means.”
• 2021: “This Year’s Flu Vaccine Is a ‘Major Mismatch,’ Researcher Says”

Myth: Science Says Flu Shots Are the Best Way to Protect Against Flu

Echoing the CDC, Munson Healthcare prefaces its list of “myths” by asserting that getting an annual flu shot is the “most effective way” to prevent the flu. We have already seen several reasons to doubt that claim, but the simple fact of the matter is that there are no studies comparing rates of influenza between people who choose to get a flu shot every year and people who skip the shots but make healthy lifestyle choices, including maintaining sufficient levels of vitamin D.

Consequently, the claim that flu shots are the best way to prevent the flu is unsupported by scientific evidence.

Myth: Flu Shots Have Been Shown to Reduce the Risk of Death Among the Elderly

As already discussed, Munson asserts that everyone aged six months or older should get a flu shot and that this will reduce the risk of dying from influenza. The burden of flu deaths is primarily born by the elderly, so the implicit claim from Munson that flu shots reduce the risk of elderly people dying from influenza warrants attention.

The CDC has claimed that influenza vaccines do confer this benefit to older people. However, to support that claim, the CDC relies on observational studies that have been discredited by the scientific community.

In fact, as observed in a 2005 study in Archives of Internal Medicine (which is now JAMA Internal Medicine), despite a considerable increase in vaccination coverage among the elderly between 1980 and 2001, pneumonia and influenza mortality rates actually rose substantially. A 2008 review in Virology Journal similarly observed that “influenza mortality and hospitalization rates for older Americans significantly increased in the 80’s and 90’s, during the same time that influenza vaccination rates for elderly Americans dramatically increased.”

The effect of influenza vaccines on influenza mortality—much less their effect on all-cause mortality—was never studied in clinical trials, and later studies showed that the studies relied upon by the CDC to support its claim were fatally flawed due to a selection bias known as “healthy user bias”. In short, it wasn’t that elderly people who got a flu shot were less likely to die that flu season but that elderly people who were so frail that they were likely to soon die were less likely to get a flu shot. As a 2006 article in the International Journal of Epidemiology observed, the magnitude of this demonstrated selection bias “was sufficient to account entirely for the associations observed”.

In other words, there is no good evidence to support the claim of a mortality benefit of influenza vaccination for elderly people.

Myth: Flu Shots Have Been Proven Safe for Pregnant Women

Going back to the first “Myth” presented, Munson expresses the opinion—not to be confused with a fact—that everyone aged six months and up needs to get vaccinated, including “pregnant women”. The implication is that flu shots have been shown to be safe for pregnant women and their developing babies.

In fact, under the classification system used by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for mandated labeling of all drugs to describe their safety and effectiveness during pregnancy, all licensed inactivated influenza vaccines are categorized as products for which “there are no adequate and well-controlled studies in pregnant women”.

Flu shot manufacturers avoid legal liability for harms caused by their products in pregnant women by including the warning in their package inserts that “Safety and effectiveness . . . have not been established in pregnant women or nursing mothers.”

As noted in a 2012 review in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, “prelicensure data on influenza vaccine safety and effectiveness during pregnancy is virtually nonexistent” since pregnant women are typically excluded from randomized, placebo-controlled trials. To support its own claims about the safety of flu shots in pregnant women, the CDC relies instead on postmarketing observational studies. Thus, the CDC has insanely adopted a lower standard of evidence for safety specifically for pregnant women.

The exclusion of pregnant women from clinical trials on ethical grounds raises an obvious question: If it is considered unethical for pregnant women to participate in clinical trials, how is it not also unethical to recommend that all pregnant women be vaccinated in the absence of clinical trial data demonstrating that this is a safe practice for both mother and child?

In what way does the CDC’s flu shot recommendation not treat the population of pregnant women as subjects of a mass uncontrolled experiment without their properly informed consent?

Especially concerning is the fact that the CDC does not advise pregnant women to at least get a version of the flu shot that does not contain the preservative thimerosal, which is about half ethylmercury by weight. As FDA researchers acknowledged in 2001, after it became known that the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule was exposing infants to cumulative levels of mercury in excess of the government’s own safety guidelines, “no controlled studies have been conducted to examine low-dose thimerosal toxicity in humans”. Nevertheless, the FDA researchers further admitted, “similar toxicological profiles between ethylmercury and methylmercury”—the latter of which is the form of mercury found in fish due to environmental contamination, which pregnant women are advised to limit intake of due to risk of toxicity—“suggest that neurotoxicity may also occur at low doses of thimerosal”.

To support its claim that the mercury in flu shots is “very safe”, including for pregnant women, the CDC cites six observational studies and a 2004 review by the Institute of Medicine that in fact acknowledged the methodological limitations of observational studies; described thimerosal as a “known neurotoxin” that crosses both the blood-brain and placental barriers; acknowledged that some of the mercury from thimerosal exposure “accumulates in the brain”; and admitted that “heavy metals, including thimerosal, can injure the nervous system.”

On its “Frequently Asked Questions” page about Thimerosal, the CDC refers visitors to an additional list of studies supposedly supporting the CDC’s claim that ethylmercury is “very safe”. Yet the very first study cited is the same study by FDA researchers, published in 2001 in the journal Pediatrics, in which they admitted that ethylmercury is neurotoxic even at low doses and that it was possible that mercury exposure from vaccines could cause neurodevelopmental abnormalities in children.

The second study on the CDC’s list, published in 2005 in Environment Health Perspectives, in fact showed in a primate model that, while more rapidly eliminated from the blood than methylmercury, ethylmercury was more persistent in the brain. Thus, the CDC’s own cited source directly contradicts its claim that ethylmercury is “very safe” because it is readily eliminated from the body.

Far from drawing the same conclusion as the CDC, the study authors actually concluded that the government’s use of methylmercury toxicology as a reference for risk assessment from thimerosal exposure is scientifically invalid, and that the use of mercury in vaccines represents a significant cause for concern.

Noting that “a much higher proportion” of inorganic mercury was found in the brains of thimerosal-exposed monkeys, they further observed that inorganic mercury in the brain has been “associated with a significant increase in the number of microglia in the brain” and that “‘an active neuroinflammatory process’ has been demonstrated in brains of autistic patients, including a marked activation of microglia.”

In their concluding remarks, they also expressed dismay that the Institute of Medicine, in its 2004 report, implicitly recommended that further research not be undertaken to test the biologically plausible hypothesis that vaccines can cause autism. “This approach is difficult to understand,” they remarked, “given our current limited knowledge of the toxicokinetics and developmental neurotoxicity of thimerosal, a compound that has been (and will continue to be) injected into millions of newborns and infants.”

Far from supporting the CDC’s claim that science has shown that mercury exposure from vaccines is “very safe”, this study actually concluded that more research into the neurotoxic potential of thimerosal and its breakdown product ethylmercury was “urgently needed” to be able to draw any meaningful conclusions about “the potential developmental effects of immunization with thimerosal-containing vaccines in newborns and infants.”

It would be superfluous to further illustrate how the CDC’s own cited sources directly contradict the CDC’s claims for which those sources are cited. The bottom line is that if the vaccine manufacturers themselves were to make the same claims as the CDC about the safety of vaccinating pregnant women, they could be sued for fraud. (For many more examples demonstrating the CDC’s habit of grossly mischaracterizing studies, see my article “The CDC’s Criminal Recommendation for a Flu Shot During Pregnancy”.)

While the “public health” establishment tells pregnant women to get vaccinated to avoid the potential inflammatory effects of an influenza infection, vaccination in effect guarantees that these women will experience inflammatory immune activation, which is understood to be a risk factor for developmental abnormalities.

A 2017 study in JAMA Pediatrics found, in a cohort of 196,929 children born between 2000 and 2010, expectant mothers were diagnosed with influenza in only 0.7 percent of cases (and most of those were not lab-confirmed and could have been caused by any one of a large number of other viruses that cause flu-like illness).

The purpose of the study was to investigate whether there is an association between either influenza infection or vaccination during pregnancy and the risk of autism. No association between infection and autism was found. However, influenza vaccination during the first trimester “was associated with an increased risk”, indicating four additional cases of autism for every 1,000 women vaccinated.

The authors then inappropriately “corrected” their data by treating potential cofactors in the development of autism as competing hypotheses, which inappropriate “correction” disappeared the statistical significance of their finding.

In a response letter published in JAMA Pediatrics criticizing the study for using an inappropriate method to supposedly “correct” the data, a team of Italian researchers further observed that, given an estimated 100 healthy adults needing to be vaccinated to prevent one case of influenza, the finding of only two out of every 1,000 women were diagnosed with influenza during pregnancy, and the observation that 297 out of every 1,000 women were vaccinated, vaccination was likely to produce more inflammatory effects than influenza among the population of pregnant women.

Given the finding before “correction” of four additional cases of autism for every 1,000 women vaccinated during pregnancy, the researchers remarked, “it seems reasonable to apply the precautionary principle and refrain from vaccinating women or at least to avoid vaccination in the first trimester of pregnancy.”

Conclusion

Of course, health care providers like Munson cannot be bothered to familiarize the public with what is actually in the medical literature and rather content themselves with regurgitating the government-sanctioned disinformation. This is simply because the aim of virtually the entire so-called “public health” establishment, including health care providers, is not to properly educate individuals to be able to make their own informed choice. Instead, their aim is to manufacture consent for government vaccine policies by deceiving people about the science.

As ever, what they say science says about vaccines and what we actually know from the scientific literature are two completely different things. The “public health” establishment just doesn’t want you to know what the science really says, and so they go on pretending as though there were no legitimate reasons not to get vaccinated according to the CDC’s recommendations.

The transparency of the propaganda talking points is particularly illuminating when it comes to the claim that everybody needs an annual flu shot.