Beware of Flu Shot Misinformation from the New York Times!

The New York Times’ History of Brazenly Lying about Flu Shots

In January of 2018, the New York Times ran an article stating that a 2010 systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews found that inactivated influenza vaccines confer “a big payoff in public health.”

That claim was directly contradicted by the conclusion of its authors that their findings “seem to discourage the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure.”

In fact, far from endorsing the recommendation from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for everyone aged six months and up, including pregnant women, to get an annual flu shot, the review authors went so far as to criticize the CDC for deliberately misrepresenting the science to support its policy.

The authors of a CDC policy document outlining the rationale for the recommendation had misquoted previous Cochrane reviews and made generalizations that “are not supported by any evidence and seem to originate from the desire to use our review to support decisions already taken.” The CDC authors “clearly do not weight interpretation by quality of the evidence, but quote anything that supports their theory.”

While the CDC’s recommendation was based on the assumptions that the flu shot (a) reduces viral transmission and (b) reduces the risk of serious complications from influenza, the review found “no evidence that vaccines prevent viral transmission or complications.”

To reiterate: the review found that the fundamental assumptions underlying the CDC’s universal flu shot recommendation were unsupported by scientific evidence.

In fact, none of the studies included in the review even seemed to consider the question of whether the CDC’s central assumptions were true. Reliable evidence on influenza vaccines was “thin”, and there was “evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies”. What little benefit from flu shots the review did find—which was that 100 healthy adults needed to accept the risks from vaccination to prevent a single case of influenza—“should be interpreted in light of this finding.”

The same New York Times article further characterized the Cochrane review as finding that “The negatives of a flu shot are almost nonexistent, and significant side effects are very rare.”

What the review actually found was that there was such little evidence available that they couldn’t even do an assessment of flu shot safety in young children, which led the authors to conclude that, “If immunization in children is to be recommended as a public health policy, large-scale studies assessing important outcomes . . . are urgently required.”

The moral of the story is that mainstream media outlets like the New York Times brazenly lie to you and, when it comes to the topic of vaccines, what they do is policy advocacy, not journalism.

Moreover, when the media spread vaccine disinformation, they are merely following the example set by the CDC.

Now here we are in September 2023, and flu season propaganda season is upon us once more. Earlier this month, the New York Times published a “guide” to fall vaccine shots, but instead of providing its readers with the information they would need to make an informed choice, the Times provides a mere three paragraphs aimed at manufacturing consent for the CDC’s policy goal of increasing vaccine uptake.

What is astounding is how greatly America’s “newspaper of record” manages to mislead its readers in just those three short paragraphs.