On April 14, 2004, Glen Nowak, the director of media relations for the CDC, provided insight into the mind-set of American public health officials with his presentation titled
“Increasing Awareness and Uptake of Influenza Immunization.” Mr. Nowak told the crowd he considered his job to be to promote “concern, anxiety, and worry” amongst the general population, especially with people who “don’t routinely receive an annual influenza vaccination.” Lost in this seventeen-slide presentation that day was the acknowledgment that some of the messaging Mr. Nowak was encouraging, looked a lot like lying.
Just nine months after Mr. Nowak’s presentation, in an article published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Dr. Peter Doshi asked (and answered) a question that put Mr. Nowak’s recommendations under intense scrutiny. Dr. Doshi’s article,
“Are US Flu Death Figures More PR Than Science?” explained that the CDC’s claims of thirty-six thousand annual deaths from flu were “surely exaggerated” and that “until corrected and until unbiased statistics are developed, the chances for sound discussion and public health policy are limited.” In an unusually tough critique, Dr. Doshi (who today serves as editor of the BMJ) even called Mr. Nowak out by name and cited his seven-step recipe as proof of the willingness of the CDC to cite figures and outcomes that science can’t support, all in the name of getting more people vaccinated.
In 2006, a year after Dr. Doshi’s critique, Dr. Tom Jefferson of the highly esteemed and independent Cochrane Collaboration issued a blistering report about the flu vaccine, again in the BMJ. Cochrane’s goal as an organization is to provide consumers with “health information that is free from commercial sponsorship and other conflicts of interest,” and Dr. Jefferson’s article,
“Influenza Vaccination: Policy Versus Evidence,” not only supported Dr. Doshi’s arguments but also challenged the entirety of Mr. Nowak’s messaging (and therefore the CDC’s).
Dr. Jefferson found a “large gap between policy and what the data tell us” and “a gross overestimation of the impact of influenza” and also felt that “the optimistic and confident tone of some predictions of viral circulation and of the impact of inactivated vaccines, which are at odds with the evidence, is striking,”and he urged that a “re-evaluation [of the entire use of flu vaccine] should be urgently undertaken.”
Dr. Doshi, by now a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, took another swing at the flu vaccine in 2013 in an essay titled
“Influenza: Marketing Vaccine by Marketing Disease,”
His words were incisive:
"...across the country, mandatory influenza vaccination policies have cropped up, particularly in healthcare facilities, precisely because not everyone wants the vaccination, and compulsion appears the only way to achieve high vaccination rates. Closer examination of influenza vaccine policies shows that although proponents employ the rhetoric of science, the studies underlying the policy are often of low quality, and do not substantiate officials’ claims. The vaccine might be less beneficial and less safe than has been claimed, and the threat of influenza appears overstated."
A reasonable question to ask if you read Dr. Doshi’s essay from start to finish would be, “How does the flu vaccine survive such pointed criticism?” Yet look around today, and nothing has changed. The “36,000 flu deaths per year”unsupportable statistic is still routinely cited, and marketing for the flu shot remains driven by doctors and public health officials predicting dire outcomes that never come to pass, with much of the marketing funded by vaccine makers. Head over to the CDC’s website in the fall and winter, and you’ll be greeted with encouragement to get your flu vaccine today, to “protect” both you and your family. When it comes to the flu vaccine, or really any vaccine, the CDC serves as both judge and jury. There is no check, there is no balance. There’s one agency. Many CDC employees end up on the payroll of the pharmaceutical industry like Dr. Julie Gerberding, who parlayed her position as head of the CDC into president of Merck’s vaccine division.
In late 2017 Science Magazine further exposed the limitations and false assumptions behind the flu vaccine in an article titled
“Why Flu Vaccines So Often Fail.”
It turns out the reason is more complicated than the oft-repeated claim that it’s hard to guess what the primary strain of flu will be next season:
"For many decades, researchers believed the flu vaccine offered solid protection if it was a good match to the circulating strains; studies from the 1940s through the 1960s routinely showed an efficacy of 70% to 90%. But those studies relied on a misleading methodology. Without a simple way to detect the virus in the blood, researchers measured antibody levels, looking for a spike that occurs after infection. Then in the 1990s, sensitive polymerase chain reaction tests enabled researchers to actually measure viral levels, and they told a different story. It turned out that some people who did not have the big antibody spike after exposure—and were therefore counted as a vaccine success—actually did show a jump in viral levels, signaling infection. Earlier assessments had exaggerated vaccine efficacy. What’s more, efficacy was sometimes low even when the vaccine and circulating strains appeared well matched."
How come the public is never told about all this new information? We can learn a lot from the unwillingness of public health officials to amend their story when called out in esteemed medical journals. From Mr. Nowak’s “recipe” we know that public health officials are willing to exaggerate, spin, and lie when appropriate as a matter of policy.
Extra:
"CDC reports that the [Flu] vaccine failed miserably against a flu bug that popped up halfway through the (2019) season. In fact -- the agency rated its effectiveness at just 9% against that strain and the overall effectiveness for the entire season at 29%."
she was a friend.
