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by Mike Adams
the Health Ranger
September 02, 2010
from
NaturalNews Website
As someone with a good
deal of education in scientific thinking and the scientific method,
I have put considerable effort into attempting to find any real
scientific evidence backing the widespread use of influenza vaccines
(flu season shots).
Before learning about nutrition and holistic
health, I was a computer software entrepreneur, and I have a
considerable scientific background in areas such as astronomy,
physics, human physiology, microbiology, genetics, anthropology and
human psychology.
One of my most-admired thought leaders is, in
fact, the late physicist Richard Feynman.
I don't speak from a "scientific" point of view on NaturalNews very
often because it's often a dry, boring presentation style. But I do
know the difference between real science and junk science, and I
find examples of junk science in both the "scientific" side of
things as well as the "alternative" side of things.
For example, so-called "psychic surgery," as least in the way it has
been popularized, is nothing more than clever sleight-of-hand where
the surgeon palms some chicken gizzards and then pretends to pull
diseased organs out of the abdominal cavity of some patient. The
demonstrations I've seen on film are obvious quackery.
Similarly, flu season vaccines are mainstream medicine's version of
psychic surgery: It's all just "medical sleight of hand" based on
nothing more than clever distractions and the obfuscation of
scientific facts. Flu season shots, you see, simply don't work on 99
out of 100 people (and that's being generous to the vaccine
industry, as you'll see below).
A year ago, I offered a
$10,000 reward to any person who
could find scientific proof that H1N1 vaccines were safe and
effective.
No one even made a claim to collect that reward because no such
evidence exists.
Conventional medicine, they say, is really "Evidence-Based Medicine"
(EBM).
That is, everything promoted by conventional medicine is
supposed to be based on "rigorous scientific scrutiny." It's all
supposed to be statistically validated and proven beyond a shadow of
a doubt that it works as advertised.
And in the case of flu
vaccines, they are advertised as providing some sort of absolute
protection against influenza.
"Don't miss work this flu season. Get
a flu shot!"
The idea, of course, is that getting a flu shot offers
100% protection from the flu. If you get a shot, they say, you won't
miss work from sickness.
This implication is wildly inaccurate. In fact, it's just flat-out
false. As you'll see below, it's false advertising wrapped around
junk science.
You see, there was never an independent, randomized, double-blind,
placebo-controlled study proving either the safety or effectiveness
of
the H1N1 swine flu vaccines that were heavily pushed last year
(and are in fact in this year's flu shot cocktail). No such study
has ever been done. As a result, there is no rigorous scientific
basis from which to sell such vaccines in the first place.
To try to excuse this, vaccine hucksters claim that it would be
"unethical" to conduct a placebo-controlled study of such vaccines
because they work so well that to deny the placebo group the actual
vaccine would be harmful to them. Everybody benefits from the
influenza vaccine, they insist, so the mere act of conducting a
scientifically-controlled test is unethical.
Do you smell some quackery at work yet? This is precisely the kind
of pseudoscientific gobbledygook you might hear from some mad
Russian scientist who claims to have "magic water" but you can't
test the magic water because the mere presence of measurement
instruments nullifies the magical properties of the water.
Similarly, vaccine pushers often insist it's unethical to test
whether their vaccines really work. You just have to "take it on
faith" that vaccines are universally good for everybody.
Yep, I used the word "faith." That is essentially what the so-called
scientific community is invoking here with the vaccine issue: Just
BELIEVE they work, everybody! Who needs scientific evidence when
we've got FAITH in vaccines?
Forget about evidence-based medicine. Forget about any rational
cost-benefit analysis. Forget about the risk-to-benefit ratio
calculations that should be part of any rational decision making
about vaccines. No,
the vaccine industry (and its apologist bloggers)
already know that vaccines are universally good for you, therefore
no such rigorous scientific assessment is even required!
The Scientific Method, in other words, doesn't really apply to the
things they already believe in. Faith can override reason in the
"scientific" community, if you can believe that! What's next, are
they going to claim vaccines work because some sort of "vaccine God"
makes them work?
Here, take your vaccine shot. And don't forget to pray to the
Vaccine God because that's how these things really work.
Vaccine
voodoo, in other words. (Hey, that would have been a great title for
the vaccine song, come to think of it...)
Unethical to find out if they work?
I got to wondering about the whole explanation of how it would be
"unethical" to test whether the H1N1 vaccines actually work. This
deflection strikes me as particularly odd, because it comes with an
implied follow-up statement.
Here's what they're actually saying
when they invoke this excuse:
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It is
"unethical" to conduct placebo-controlled studies on
seasonal flu vaccines to find out if they actually work
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But at the same time, it is entirely ethical to give these shots
to hundreds of millions of people, even while lacking any real
evidence that they are safe or effective
In other words, it's unethical to conduct any real science, but
entirely ethical to just keep injecting people with a substance that
might be entirely useless (or even harmful).
That's just a hint of
the kind of warped logic and failed ethics that typify our modern
vaccine industry.
Vaccine advocates claim that H1N1 vaccines are so effective that NOT
giving vaccines to a placebo group would "put their lives at risk."
That alone is apparently enough reason to avoid conducting any real
science on these vaccines.
But I'm not buying this. I think it's just a cover story - an
excuse to avoid subjecting such vaccines to rigorous scientific
inquiry because, deep down inside, they know vaccines would be
revealed as an elaborate medical fraud.
So I poked around to see if there were other randomized studies
being conducted that might actually put people's lives at risk. It
didn't take long to find some. For example, the New England Journal
of Medicine recently published two studies regarding post
heart-attack patient cooling which seeks to minimize brain damage by
physically lowering the temperature of the brain of the heart attack
patient until they can reach the acute care technicians at a nearby
hospital.
In two studies, researchers who already knew that "cooling" would
save lives nevertheless subjected 350 heart attack patient to a
randomized study protocol that assigned comatose (but resuscitated)
patients to either "cooling" temperatures or normal temperatures.
In one study, while half the cooled patients recovered with normal
brain function, only a quarter of those exposed to normal
temperatures did.
In other words, patient cooling saved their
brains. And yet the importance of knowing whether or not this
procedure really worked was apparently enough to justify withholding
the treatment from over a hundred other patients, most of whom
suffered permanent brain damage as a result.
You see, when scientists really want to know the answers to
questions like,
"Does this brain cooling work?",
...they have no qualms
about subjecting people to things like permanent brain damage in a
randomized clinical trial.
The knowledge gained from such an
experiment is arguably worth the loss of a few patient brains
because, armed with scientific evidence, such procedures can be
rolled out to help save the brains of potentially hundreds of
thousands of patients in subsequent years.
But when it comes to testing vaccines like the recent H1N1 variety,
the official explanation is that it's too dangerous to withhold
vaccines from a treatment group. They say it's not really important
to determine if vaccines are statistically validated, and it's not
worth the "risk" of withholding vaccines from anyone in a randomized
clinical trial.
Now, sure, there have been some clinical trials done on many
different vaccines over the years, but most of those are industry
funded, and there are almost never rigorous trials conducted on each
year's seasonal flu vaccines before they are released for public
consumption. As a result, each year's vaccine is a brand new
experiment, carried out across the guinea pig masses of patients who
just do whatever they're told without questioning whether it's
backed by real science.
Because, of course, it isn't. And I'm not the only one who
recognizes this inconvenient fact.
The Cochrane Collaboration
The Cochrane Collaboration, as described on its own website, is,
"...an international, independent, not-for-profit organization of
over 28,000 contributors from more than 100 countries, dedicated to
making up-to-date, accurate information about the effects of health
care readily available worldwide."
"We are world leaders in evidence-based health care," the site goes
on to say, followed by a quote from The Lancet which states, "The
Cochrane Collaboration is an enterprise that rivals the Human Genome
Project in its potential implications for modern medicine."
Working for the Cochrane Collaboration, an epidemiologist named Dr.
Tom Jefferson decided to take a close look at the scientific
evidence behind influenza vaccines (seasonal flu vaccines).
The objectives of the study were to:
"Identify, retrieve and assess
all studies evaluating the effects of vaccines against influenza in
healthy adults."
The Search Criteria:
"We searched the Cochrane Central Register of
Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library, 2010, issue 2),
MEDLINE (January 1966 to June 2010) and EMBASE (1990 to June 2010)."
Selection Criteria (for inclusion in the study):
"Randomized
controlled trials (RCTs) or quasi-RCTs comparing influenza vaccines
with placebo or no intervention in naturally-occurring influenza in
healthy individuals aged 16 to 65 years. We also included
comparative studies assessing serious and rare harms."
The Total Scope of the study encompassed over 70,000 people. And
just so you know, these the results may strongly favor the vaccine
industry. The author even went out of his way to warn that,
"15 out
of 36 trials [were] funded by industry (four had no funding
declaration)."
In other words, close to half of the studies included in this
analysis were funded by the vaccine industry itself, which as we
know consistently manipulates data, bribes researchers or otherwise
engages in scientific fraud in order to get the results they want.
The author even goes on to warn how industry-funded studies always
get more press, saying,
"...industry funded studies were published
in more prestigious journals and cited more than other studies
independently from methodological quality and size."
See the study detail page at:
http://info.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/userfiles/ccoch/file/CD001269.pdf
Study results show influenza vaccines are nearly worthless
Now here comes the interesting part: Even though nearly half the
studies were funded by the vaccine industry itself, the study
results show that in most circumstances, influenza vaccines are
virtually worthless:
"The corresponding figures [of people showing influenza symptoms]
for poor vaccine matching were 2% and 1% (RD 1, 95% CI 0% to 3%)"
say the study authors.
And by "poor vaccine matching," they mean
that the strain of influenza viruses in the vaccine are a poor match
for the strains circulating in the wild.
This is usually the case in
the real world because the vaccine only incorporates last year's
viral strains and cannot predict which strains will be circulating
this year.
In other words, you would have to vaccinate 100 people to reduce the
number of people showing influenza symptoms by just one. For
ninety-nine percent of the people vaccinated, the vaccine makes no
difference at all!
In a "best case" scenario when the viral strain in the influenza
vaccine just happens to match the strain circulating in the wild --
a situation that even the study authors call "uncommon" -- the
results were as follows:
"4% of unvaccinated people versus 1% of
vaccinated people developed influenza symptoms (risk difference (RD)
3%, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2% to 5%)."
In other words, the matching vaccine (which is uncommon in the real
world) reduced influenza infections in 3 out of 100 people. Or, put
another way, 97% of those injected with the vaccine received no
benefit (and no different outcome).
Furthermore, the study's conclusions go on to state:
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"Vaccination had... no effect on hospital admissions or
complication rates."
-
"Vaccine use did not affect the number of people hospitalized or
working days lost."
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"The review showed that reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is
thin but there is evidence of widespread manipulation of
conclusions..."
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"There is no evidence that [influenza vaccines] affect
complications, such as pneumonia, or transmission." (Got that?
Vaccines do not affect transmission of the disease, yet that's the
whole reason vaccines are pushed so heavily during pandemics - to
block disease transmission.)
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"In average conditions (partially matching vaccine) 100 people
need to be vaccinated to avoid one set of influenza symptoms."
And finally, the study author's summary concludes with this whopper
of a statement:
"Our results may be an optimistic estimate because
company-sponsored influenza vaccines trials tend to produce results
favorable to their products and some of the evidence comes from
trials carried out in ideal viral circulation and matching
conditions and because the harms evidence base is limited."
In other words, taking into account the industry bias, the actual
results may be that vaccines prevent influenza symptoms in only 1
out of 1,000 people.
Putting it in perspective
So let's put all this in perspective in a rational, intelligent way.
This far-reaching analysis of influenza vaccine trials shows that
under common conditions, seasonal influenza vaccines have no benefit
for 99 out of 100 people.
Furthermore, even this result is describe as being "an optimistic
estimate" because nearly half of the vaccine trials were funded by
the vaccine industry which tends to "produce results favorable to
their products."
Furthermore, some of the studies were carried out in "ideal" viral
matching scenarios that rarely happen in the real world.
And finally, some evidence of harm from vaccines was simply thrown
out of this analysis, resulting in a "harms evidence base" that was
quite limited and likely doesn't reveal the full picture.
Are you getting all this? Even with industry-funded studies likely
distorting the results in their favor, if you take a good hard look
at the scientific evidence surrounding the effectiveness of
vaccines, you quickly come to realize that influenza vaccines don't
work on 99 out of 100 people. (And the real answer may be even
worse.)
Now that's a far cry from the false advertising of the vaccine
industry, which implies that if you get a shot you're "protected"
from influenza. They claim you won't miss work, you'll stay well,
and so on. Through these messages, they are cleverly implying that
vaccines work on 100% of the people.
But based on the available scientific evidence, these are blatantly
false statements. And the wild exaggeration of the supposed benefits
from vaccines crosses the threshold of "misleading advertising" and
enters the realm of "criminal marketing fraud." Where is the FTC or
FDA on speaking out against this quackery?
Vaccine marketing is, essentially, scientific fraud. To claim that
vaccines protect everyone when, in reality, they may reduce symptoms
in only one out of 100 people is intellectually dishonest and
downright fraudulent.
It is, simply put, just pure B.S. quackery.
Now, imagine if an herbal product were advertised on television as
offering some health benefit, but it turned out that the product
only worked on 1 out of 100 people who took it. That herbal product
would be widely branded as "quackery" and the company selling it
would be accused of false advertising. The company owners might even
be charged with criminal fraud.
But vaccines get a free pass on this issue. While an herbal product
might be heavily investigated or even confiscated by the FDA,
vaccines that only work on 1% of the people receive the full backing
of the FDA, CDC, WHO, FTC and local hospitals and clinics to boot.
The fact that the vaccine is pure quackery apparently doesn't matter
to any of these organizations: It's full speed ahead, regardless of
what the science actually says.
Once you understand all this, you now understand why it is an
accurate statement to say,
"The FDA promotes medical fraud."
Similarly,
"The CDC promotes medical fraud."
As does the WHO.
These are scientifically accurate statements, assuming you agree
that a product that only works on 1 out of 100 people fits the
definition of "fraud" when it is marketed as if it helped everyone.
And most people would agree with that reasonable definition of
fraud.
It's a totally different story if the efficacy ratio is higher. If
influenza vaccines actually produced some benefit in 25 out of 100
people, that might be worth considering. But it's nowhere near that.
The FDA, by the way, will often approve pharmaceuticals that only
produce results in 5 percent of the clinical trial subjects. The
world of modern medicine, in fact, is full of pharmaceuticals that
simply don't work on 95% of the patients who take them.
It's entitled, "Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults",
authors:
"Tom Jefferson, Carlo Di Pietrantonj, Alessandro Rivetti,
Ghada A Bawazeer, Lubna A Al-Ansary, Eliana Ferroni"
Enter the vaccine zombies!
With these study results in mind, take a look at some of the lyrics
in my recent hip hop song, "Vaccine Zombie" (http://www.naturalnews.com/vaccine_zombie.html)
I forgot how to think for myself
I don't understand a thing about health
I do the same as everyone else
I'm a vaccine zombie, zombie
Now you can see where these lyrics come from. If influenza vaccines
are worthless for 99 percent of those who receive them, then why are
people lining up to get injected?
The answer is because they fail to think critically about vaccines
and their health. They don't understand health, so they just go
along with everybody else and do what they're told. Hence their
earning of the "Vaccine Zombie" designation.
The song goes on to say:
I'm a sucker for the ads, a sucker for the labs
A sucker for the swine flu jabs
and I don't mind followin' a medical fad
Cause livin' without a brain ain't half bad
Yes, people who line up for influenza vaccines are "suckers" who
have been bamboozled by fraudulent vaccine propaganda. But they're
following a "medical fad" and it's easier to just do what you're
told rather than engage your brain and think critically about what
you're doing.
"Livin' without a brain ain't half bad" because it takes the burden
of decision making out of the loop and allows you to just rely on
whatever the doctors and health officials tell you to do.
How the scientific community lost touch with real science
But what if they were all lying to you? Or what if they, themselves,
were ignorant about the fact that influenza vaccines are worthless
on 99% of those who receive them?
(Very few doctors and scientists,
it turns out, are aware of this simple truth.)
Or what if the vaccine pushers had all convinced themselves of a
falsehood? What if they truly believed that vaccines were really,
really good for everyone but that belief was based on wishful
thinking rather than rigorous scientific review?
Because that, my friends, is exactly what has happened. We have an
entire segment of the scientific community that has been suckered
into vaccine propaganda. They've convinced themselves that seasonal
flu shots really work and that virtually everyone should be injected
with such shots. And they believe this based on irrational faith,
not on scientific thinking or rigorous statistical evidence.
They are, in other words, pursuing a vaccine religion (or cult). The
is especially curious, given that most vaccine pushers don't believe
in God or any organized religion - except for their own vaccine
religion, where real scientific evidence isn't required. All you got
to do is believe in vaccines and you can join their religion,
too.
And so all across the 'net, so-called "science bloggers" embarrass
themselves by promoting near-useless influenza vaccines as
"evidence-based medicine," apparently unaware that the evidence
shows such vaccines to be all but worthless.
They might as well say they support vaccines "Just 'cuz."
And "just 'cuz" is no reason to inject yourself with a chemical
cocktail that even the industry admits causes extremely dangerous
neurological side effects in a small number of vaccine recipients.
Vitamin D would actually make vaccines work better
To top this all off, here's the real kicker of this story: You can
beat the minimal protective benefits of vaccines with a simple,
low-cost vitamin D supplement. Vitamin D, you see, is the nutrient
that activates your immune system to fight off infectious disease.
Without it, vaccines hardly work at all.
In fact, the very low rate of vaccine efficacy (1%) is almost
certainly due to the fact that most people receiving the vaccines
are vitamin D deficient. (Anywhere from 75% - 95% of Americans are
deficient in vitamin D, depending on whom you ask.)
Hilariously, the way to make vaccines work better would be to hand
out vitamin D supplements to go along with the shots! Even more
hilariously, if people were taking vitamin D supplements, they
wouldn't need the vaccine shots in the first place!
Influenza vaccines, in other words, have no important role
whatsoever in preventing influenza infections. This goal can be
accomplished more safely, reliably and at far lower cost by
promoting vitamin D supplements for the population at large.
What we really need to see from the scientific world is a study
comparing
vitamin D supplements to influenza vaccines (and using
realistic vitamin D doses, not just 200 or 400
IUs per day). I have
absolutely no doubt that healthy-dose vitamin D supplementation
(4000 IUs a day) would prove to be significantly more effective than
influenza vaccines at preventing flu infections.
But such a study will almost certainly never be done (at least not
anytime soon) because it would expose the false propaganda of the
vaccine industry while giving consumers a far better way of
protecting themselves from influenza that doesn't involve paying
money to vaccine manufacturers.
In medicine, as in war, truth is often the first casualty. And when
the lies are repeated with enough frequency, they begin to be
believed. The flu shot lie has been repeated with such ferocity and
apparent authority that it has snookered in virtually the entire
"scientific" community.
That even rational-minded scientists can be so easily hoodwinked by
the vaccine industry is causing more and more people to question the
credibility of not just modern medicine, but the entire scientific
community as well.
Because if so-called "rational" scientists and thought leaders can
be so easily suckered into an obvious falsehood, what other fictions
might they be promoting as fact?
Medicine, you see, makes all the other sciences look bad. The
obvious scientific fraud going on in the name of "science" in the
pharmaceutical industry makes a mockery of real scientific thought.
The ease of which medical scientists have been hoodwinked by the
drug industry calls into question the rationality of all sciences.
And in doing so, it brings up an even bigger question: Is science
the best path to gaining knowledge in the first place?
This is
obviously a philosophical question, not a scientific question, and
it's beyond the scope of this article, but it's one I will likely
visit here on NaturalNews very soon in an upcoming article.
There are many paths to truth, you see.
Science - good science - is one of them, but it is not the only one. Any scientist who
believes that science has a monopoly on all knowledge is himself a
fool. Just read a little Feynman and you'll quickly come to discover
that the very brightest minds in the history of science consistently
recognized there were other pathways leading to truth.
I believe if Feynman were alive today and saw the vaccine propaganda
taking place in the name of "science," he would respond with
something like,
"Surely you're joking."
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