The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, recommends that everyone aged six months and up should get an annual flu shot, and public health officials and the media routinely relay the CDC’s recommendation to us by characterizing this policy as being firmly grounded in science. However, what the government and mainstream media say science says about the influenza vaccine and what science actually tells us are two completely different things.
A useful case study of the divergence between the science and the public message is the New York Times article “Why It’s Still Worth Getting a Flu Shot”. Its author, Aaron E. Carroll, characterizes the science as though it fully vindicates the CDC’s recommendation. To support this characterization, he cites systematic reviews of the medical literature conducted by the prestigious Cochrane Collaboration. However, as demonstrated in part one of this series, Carroll’s own sources in fact arrived at the opposite conclusion.
To briefly review, Carroll claims that science tells us that the flu vaccine—even in years such as this one, when it is admittedly “particularly ineffective”—confers “a big payoff in public health”. Yet the very Cochrane review he cites to support this claim in fact concluded that the available scientific evidence rather seems “to discourage the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure.”
Carroll claims that harms from the influenza vaccine are “almost nonexistent”, yet the authors of the very Cochrane review he cites to support this claim in fact concluded that there is an alarming lack of studies demonstrating the vaccine’s safety in children. As they put it, “If immunization in children is to be recommended as a public health policy, large-scale studies assessing important outcomes, and directly comparing vaccine types are urgently required.”
As also seen in part one, the New York Times, in so greatly deceiving its readers, was simply taking its cue from the CDC. In fact, far from vindicating public policy, as the Times would have us believe, the Cochrane researchers actually went so far in their criticism of the CDC as to accuse the agency of deliberately misrepresenting the science in order to support its influenza vaccine recommendation.
The example the review authors cited to illustrate this official dishonesty was a policy document outlining the CDC’s rationale for its flu shot recommendation. As outlined therein, the CDC’s primary justifications for this policy are the assumptions that universal vaccination will reduce transmission of the influenza virus and reduce the risk of potentially deadly complications from influenza.
And yet, in their 2010 systematic review of the literature, the Cochrane researchers found “no evidence that vaccines prevent viral transmission or complications”. In fact, in a remarkable illustration of the institutional myopia that exists within the medical and scientific communities when it comes to vaccines, they noted that none of the studies included in their review even seemed to consider the question of whether the central assumptions underlying the CDC’s policy were actually true.
Furthermore, whereas the CDC recommends the flu vaccine for infants as young as six months, the Cochrane researchers found “only one study of inactivated vaccine in children under two years”—hence the need for safety studies being “urgently required”.
Whereas the CDC tells pregnant women to get the flu shot, the Cochrane researchers observed that the number of randomized controlled trials evaluating the safety for the expectant mother and her developing fetus was zero.
In this second installment, we’ll dive deeper, taking a closer look at the claims the CDC makes to support its policy. You will see how the CDC serves the pharmaceutical industry by using fear and deception to sell more flu vaccines.
This includes scaring people into getting the vaccine by citing numbers of influenza-related hospitalizations and deaths that may be greatly overestimated, as well as relying on thoroughly discredited claims about the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing deaths among the elderly, for whom there is the greatest risk of potentially deadly complications. And whereas the CDC assumes the vaccine prevents transmission, one recent study that bothered to actually look at that question indicates that it might actually increase the spread of the influenza virus.
Additionally, you’ll come to understand how it can be possible that there is such a shocking disparity between public policy and the scientific evidence. In addition to an institutionalized bias favoring public policy due to the influence of government on the science, the disparity is also in part explained by the endemic corruption that exists at the CDC. Furthermore, and regardless of why this deception exists, public vaccine policy constitutes a gross violation of the individual right to informed consent.
That is to say, government policy represents a serious threat to both our health and our liberty, and this should be concerning to everyone, regardless of one’s own personal choice or individual risk-benefit assessment about whether or not to vaccinate.
The CDC’s “Problem” of “Growing Health Literacy”
To preface our further examination of the CDC’s claims versus what science actually tells us, it’s useful to examine the mindset at the agency with respect to how CDC officials view their role in society. An instructive snapshot of this mindset was provided in a presentation by the CDC’s director of media relations on June 17, 2004, at a workshop for the Institute of Medicine (IOM).
In its presentation, the CDC outlined a “‘Recipe’ for Fostering Public Interest and High Vaccine Demand”. It called for encouraging medical experts and public health authorities to “state concern and alarm” about “and predict dire outcomes” from the flu season. To inspire the necessary fear, the CDC encouraged describing each season as “very severe”, “more severe than last or past years”, and “deadly”.
One problem for the CDC is the accurate view among healthy adults that they are at not at high risk of having serious complications from the flu. As the presentation noted, “achieving consensus by ‘fiat’ is difficult”—meaning that just because the CDC makes the recommendation doesn’t mean that people will actually follow it. Therefore it was necessary to create “concern, anxiety, and worry” among young, healthy adults who don’t regard the flu as something to be terribly afraid of.
The larger conundrum for the CDC is the proliferation of information available to the public on the internet. As the CDC bluntly stated it, “Health literacy is a growing problem”.
In other words, the CDC considers it to be a problem that people are increasingly doing their own research and becoming more adept at educating themselves about health-related issues.
And, as we have already seen, the CDC has very good reason to be concerned about people doing their own research into what the science actually says about vaccines.
Jeremy R. Hammond
Independent political analyst, journalist
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