More on the Flu - History of Vaccination Policy

Dear Friends,

As I review my overflowing flu files, I am struck by the revelation of the continuing history of vaccination policy. Some things never change, and that is true in regards to vaccination. The outline for promoting vaccines is here. Notice how vaccine advocates take years grooming and finding “evidence” so that the public will accept vaccines for all age groups. Here are some highlights, and I have again underlined things I think are important for you to notice.

Hippocrates magazine November/December, 1988, “To Get the Shot, or Not?” by Barbara Kelley. “There’s a 50-50 chance that this year’s vaccine will be another mismatch… The natural unpredictability of influenza is the reason flu shots are so often off the mark.”

“If you go without a shot and catch the flu this year, the natural defenses you’ll develop against a future infections will be broader and last longer than the protection any vaccine could provide.” Among experts, one of the more candid is Thomas Cate of the Influenza Research Center at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine. ‘If your health is such that flu represents a nuisance, not a life-threatening illness,’ Cate says, ‘you’re probably better off getting sick now and being over with it for the next several years than trying to get the vaccine every year.’”

“Flu Vaccine Can Protect Unborn Babies” was the October 25, 1990, article in the Watertown (NY) Daily Times. ”Vaccinating pregnant women for flu helps protect their babies from the disease after birth, is safe and could point the way to other such vaccines, according to Baylor Medical School researchers… Researchers believe flu immunity passed from a mother to child lasts abut four months…”

“Flu Shots Win Couple Trip to Fla.” was the December 17, 1992, headline in the Watertown (NY) Daily Times. It told the story of an elderly couple in Rochester, NY, who “…play SHOTTO—a lottery game concocted by Monroe County health officials to entice residents to get their flu shots…Health officials had feared there might be fewer people getting flu shots this year because there was no federal grant to subsidize the program. The county asked $5 this year per shot, but no one was turned away for lack of money.”

The August 13, 1993, issue of MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication of the Massachusetts Medical Society, had “Final Results: Medicare Influenza Vaccine Demonstration—Selected States, 1988-1992.”

“In 1988, the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA and CDC) began a congressionally mandated 4-year demonstration project to evaluate the cost-effectiveness to Medicare of providing influenza vaccine to Medicare beneficiaries… The Medicare Influenza Demonstration increased annual influenza vaccine coverage and measured both health and economic benefits of influenza vaccine for Medicare. The perspective of the payer used in this study was important in securing coverage for this benefit; however, it differs from cost-effectiveness studies of prevention strategies that usually use a societal perspective and include all direct costs, not just those of the payer. In this study, only the costs paid by Medicare were included. Other costs, such as those incurred by patients for travel or by providers for patient’s visits or vaccine administration above the amount paid by Medicare, were not included…The demonstration’s success in vaccine delivery resulted from focused interventions to overcome common barriers to adult vaccination, including the absence of a comprehensive vaccine delivery system, limited reimbursement mechanism, and a lack of vaccination programs where adults congregate. No statutory requirements mandating vaccination of Medicare beneficiaries were necessary to implement this program.”

“19 at Time Get AIDS Test After Flu Shot Needles Are Reused” was the headline in the November 6, 1993, issue of the New York Times. This story was in regards to Time magazine employees who had gotten their flu shots in the workplace. “That method (reusing needles) is not appropriate, according to the CDC… Pamela Howell, a spokeswoman for the centers said the risk of infection was considerably less when injecting someone than when drawing blood.”

“Fearing the Flu” was a short news brief in the January 21, 1996, Syracuse (NY) Herald American. “Experts agree a pandemic is in the cards sometime and will require a huge mobilization to vaccinate the entire U.S. population.”

“The Cold Facts About Flu Vaccines” by Paula Linquist in the November, 1997, issue of Alive magazine (Canada) mentions thimerosal and formaldehyde as vaccine preservatives. The article also talks about common sense actions to prevent the flu, as well as “…a number of homeopathic remedies which have produced excellent results in the treatment of colds and flu…”

”Disease detectives untangle mystery of mutant flu virus” by Bob Williams was a page one article in the News & Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina on May 31, 1999. “The discovery of a hybrid of human and pig viruses in a North Carolina swine herd recently sent scientists scrambling to determine whether the new bug was a threat to people.”

Quoted in the article was Dr. Gene Erickson, director of microbiological testing at the State Department of Agriculture’s animal disease diagnostic lab in Raleigh. “His concern deepened when he learned that some of the sick sows had been specifically immunized for classic swine flu. ‘It started to look like we might have a novel, new strain of swine influenza on our hands.’… Pigs are ideal mixing vessels, because they can pick up viruses from both birds and human. And since viruses are always mutating, pigs can produce viruses that have a mix of genetic traits from both birds and humans. After that, it is possible for a potentially deadly strain of avian influenza virus to make the relatively short genetic hop from pigs to people… By October… lab had figured out that the samples were a “reassorted virus,” a novel strain with traits of both human and swine virus. More specifically, the lab concluded that the virus had originated in humans and jumped to pigs… Dr. Nancy Cox, an influenza researcher at the CDC said “’You have veterinary consequences as well as human consequences of this interspecies transmission.’”

“Military community helps determine flu vaccine recipe” was the Army Times headline for January 17, 2000. In her article, Deborah Funk wrote “…what many don’t know is that information collected from military members and their families around the world helps determine the vaccine’s recipe in any given year. The U.S. military community is not the only population that is monitored to keep tabs on viruses in circulation. But their medical information, like that of many other groups in many different countries, helps global public health authorities complete the picture… the puzzle pieces are fed through a hierarchy of public health networks, ultimately reaching the World Health Organization.

WHO coordinates four international collaborating centers, including the CDC, to help determine ingredients for the flu vaccine, based on virus surveillance. The CDC collects its information from U.S. civilian physicians and military members, and from foreign countries. The viruses are then compared and analyzed. That information is forwarded to both the WHO and the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.”

The November 20, 2000, issue of Army Times headline was “Flu shots suspended in Europe, the Pacific.”

“Shipments of influenza vaccine that arrived in Europe and the Pacific in October may have lost at least some of their potency because the vaccine became colder during shipment than the drug manufacturer recommended… A worker with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the CDC did not have data but that she did not think use of the vaccine posed a safety risk, although the efficacy of the vaccine might have been affected.”

Another theory for the 1918 flu pandemic was printed in Discover magazine, March, 2001, p.11 “The Fifth-Column Epidemic. “…demographer Andrew Noymer of the University of California at Berkeley thinks people are overlooking a second culprit: Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the tuberculosis bacterium… Between one quarter and one half of all Americans felled by the flu were already infected with tuberculosis… which helps explain why so many who died were adults. If Noymer is correct, another similarly virulent flu epidemic here would not be so lethal today…”

“Flu shots can cut health costs” was the March 18, 2001, headline of the Richmond (Virginia) Times Dispatch. “Giving flu shots to all 95 million working Americans, ages 18-64 could save the nation as much as $1.3 billion annually” said Dr. Kristin Nichol of the Center for Chronic Disease Outcomes Research at the VA Medical Center and a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. Her research was published in The Archives of Internal Medicine, an American Medical Association publication.

“…even though healthy people tend to recover in a few days, they still log up to 75 million lost workdays and 22 million doctor visits annually, the study said… In 1994, Nichol and her colleagues published a study that said immunizing elderly Americans saves the nation hundreds of millions of dollars annually in health care costs and cuts the death rate by 54%… In her latest study, Nichol used a sophisticated computer model to examine the health, labor and economic statistics from a variety of influenza studies. The model took into account rates of illness from influenza, time lost from work, hourly wages, the costs of vaccinations and other direct and indirect costs…”

The Syracuse (New York) Post Standard of August 3, 2004, had an article by the Associated Press “Mother’s flu linked to schizophrenia.”

“A new study adds more evidence to a body of research that suggests the children of some women who get the flu while pregnant are at higher risk for developing schizophrenia… The researchers emphasized that the overall risks are still ‘quite small.’ (The study appears in August’s Archives of General Psychiatry, lead author Dr. Alan Brown.) “The study involved 189 women--64 of whom had children who developed schizophrenia and 125 whose children did not… Other research has suggested infections other than flu might be involved, including measles and genital herpes during pregnancy, which may adversely affect the developing brain…” Note the article for 2008 below.

2005 was an interesting year regarding reporting for flu vaccines. Here are 3:

February 15, 2005, the Syracuse (NY) Post Standard had an AP article “Study: Flu shots not saving any elderly lives: Researchers advocate shifting focus of vaccination programs to children.”

“A study based on more than three decades of U.S. data suggests that giving flu shots to the elderly has not saved any lives. Led by National Institutes of Health researchers, the study challenges government dogma (paper published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researcher Lone Simonsen of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases). “The study should influence flu prevention strategy, Simonsen said, perhaps by expanding vaccination to schoolchildren, the biggest spreaders of the virus. However, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans no change. ‘We think the best way to help the elderly is to vaccinate them,’ said CDC epidemiologist William Thompson. ‘These results don’t contribute to changing vaccine policy.’”

“Universal flu shots urged,” was the headline of USA Today of October 31, 2005, by Anita Manning. “Vaccine experts are considering recommending annual flu vaccine not just for those at highest risk of serious illness, but for everyone.” This was the result of a conference on flu vaccine policy sponsored by Emory University’s Program for Vaccine Policy and Development, Walter Orenstein, director. “The general concern is there is a lot more (illness and death) out there that we don’t seem to be preventing with our current strategy,” Orenstein says.

Apparently, the experts at the conference wanted universal flu vaccination, but the final consensus was that “…it should be a stepwise process, starting with widening flu shot recommendations to include children ages 2 to 5.”

“Vaccines Can’t Stop Flu Mutation” by Candice Choi was the headline for the October 21, 2005, issue of The Journal, Ogdensburg, NY. “Flu vaccines may prove ineffective when scientists fail to anticipate how the virus may mutate… The study conducted by The Institutes of Genome Research with the State Health Department’s Wadsworth Center was published… in the journal Nature and posted on its website. “The 2003-2004 flu season is an example of a year when the flu virus had mutated so that the vaccine was useless…As a result, many people who had been vaccinated ultimately became sick.”

“Infected with Insanity” by Melinda Wenner was the title of an April/May, 2008, article in Scientific American Mind (www.SciAmMind.com). Subtitle: “The evidence is mounting: mental illness might be caused by microbes.”

“According to a growing body of research, the culprit is surprising: the flu… In 2006 scientists at Columbia University asserted that up to one fifth of all schizophrenia cases are caused by prenatal infections… To date, most of the correlations found between infections and psychiatric conditions are just that--correlations. There is no conclusive evidence that infections actually cause these diseases, it could be, for example, that carrying the genes for mental illness makes a person more likely to behave in a way that exposes him or her to a virus… Some studies suggest that infections per se are not responsible for disrupting brain development; rather the body’s immune response to infection affects the nervous system and does the damage… The immune system may inadvertently harm the brain in another way, too--and not only in a fetus. Although current scientific evidence most strongly links mental illness to prenatal infections, many researchers are also investigating the possibility that childhood or even adult infections could cause psychiatric conditions by triggering an autoimmune reaction ... Even the small body of work that now exist could have immediate policy implications.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommend that all pregnant women get flu shots--a dangerous proposition if immune response, rather than infection itself, is responsible for harming the fetal brain. ‘I don’t think they have considered this risk. In fact, I know they haven’t considered this risk,’ California Institute of Technology biologist Paul H. Patterson says, referring to the CDC. ‘If you take it seriously and vaccinate everybody, then what’s going to happen?’ Researchers cannot yet predict how often a prenatal immune response might lead to fetal brain damage, but even if it happens less than 1% of the time, vaccinating an entire population of pregnant women could affect thousands of children… Future drugs and vaccines may target the infections directly or go after the immune system, controlling its interference with the developing brain or preventing an autoimmune attack on brain cells.”

The article had a chart, “Connecting the Dots” that said “Recent studies have found links between a huge variety of infections and psychiatric ailments, from both prenatal and postnatal exposures. Here are some of the best-supported correlations: schizophrenia and autism--Lyme disease and measles.” To see the whole chart and read the whole article, I strongly urge you to go to the website (www.SciAmMind.com)

COMMENTARY:

I hope the above gave you an idea of how vaccine promoters work. They want vaccination for all, as was discussed in 2005 articles above (and which I have known and followed for over 20 years), yet they also know they have to go about it in a piece-meal approach. And they have succeeded.

If vaccines can’t stop mutations, then what is happening to our bodies? Could it be that vaccines are causing mutations? After all, our bodies have been pumped with a number of dead and live-virus vaccines over the years. Where is the research that shows the cumulative effect of the mandated vaccines, much less the yearly flu shot? Why then are vaccines still being pushed on us, with more to come? Perhaps the idea to eradicate all diseases and suffering, while admirable, is an insanity and never ending.

Even when evidence, such as with the elderly, shows that the vaccine does not save elderly lives, the CDC is still adamant that, not only the elderly still get vaccinated, but now children—anything to expand the immunization program. We are now caught in the web of “entitlement” and it is virtually impossible for us to extricate ourselves.

It is my hope that the public reaches a tipping point sooner, rather than later, to turn this around. There is still time, but it is running short.

Bonnie Plumeri Franz