Flu Experts: Vaccine Effectiveness 'not demonstrated'

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After telling us to get our flu shots this past season, flu experts are now admitting that they could not - and still can not - predict what strain of the virus will be predominant in any coming season. So composing the vaccine is somewhat like trying to hit the winning lottery ticket.

"We were unable to demonstrate vaccine effectiveness against influenza-like illness," said the CDC's Dr. Carolyn Bridges, who studied how well the vaccine worked.

What's more, there apparently are no co-ordinated efforts to collect observations about the effectiveness of the vaccines that everyone does get, or about the side effects of the shots. "We really need to have a system in place year to year that tracks the efficacy of the vaccine", says Dr. Bruce Gellin, Director of the HHS National Vaccine Program Office.

What kind of 'science' is that? Belief in medical dogma unfortunately will not protect us from widespread adverse effects and the death toll of the pharma-based medical system, but it certainly helps keep the pharma-medical industry afloat.

U.S. Experts Struggle with Flu Vaccine Questions
Wed February 18, 2004 03:16 PM ET

(original article here)

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. vaccine experts began meeting on Wednesday to formulate next winter's influenza vaccine, but said they had trouble deciding how well last year's formula worked.

Various studies show the vaccine had effectiveness ranging from none at all to 60 percent -- statistics that confounded experts trying to decide how best to protect the public from the highly contagious virus.

"It's hard to make sense of it," Dr. Bruce Gellin, director of the Health and Human Service Department's National Vaccine Program Office, told reporters.

"We really need to have a system in place year to year that tracks the efficacy of the vaccine."

Every year the flu vaccine is reformulated in an attempt to keep up with the quickly mutating virus, which kills an average of 36,000 Americans every year and 250,000 around the world.

Last year, U.S. government health officials and the companies that make the vaccine miscalculated, and failed to predict that a new strain called the Fujian influenza A strain would be the most common cause of infection. They left it out of the vaccine mix.

Fujian A hit Australia hard, and then showed up in the United States unusually early -- in October. It made headlines as it quickly killed several young children in Colorado.

Influenza eventually killed at least 111 children in 33 states before waning in recent weeks, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

NO COORDINATED INFORMATION

Knowing how well past vaccines have worked is useful for deciding how to formulate future vaccines, but Gellin said there is no coordinated system for doing so. He said the National Vaccine Advisory Committee had been asked to come up with a better system.

Meanwhile the Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve the flu mix suggested earlier this month by the World Health Organization. The FDA committee will make its recommendations on Thursday.

Under WHO recommendations, the Fujian strain -- which caused more than 90 percent of confirmed influenza cases in the United States and Northern Europe -- will be added to the mix.

A strain known as Moscow A will be taken out.

The mix is also likely to replace the influenza B Hong Kong strain with one called Shanghai B strain, even though influenza B strains caused fewer than 10 percent of infections.

And a strain called New Caledonia, another influenza A virus, will stay in the mix.

Determining the mix is an imprecise science, as demonstrated by studies presented to the FDA's vaccine advisory committee.

"We were unable to demonstrate vaccine effectiveness against influenza-like illness," said the CDC's Dr. Carolyn Bridges, who studied how well the vaccine worked.

And Dr. Antoine Flahault of the French national research institute INSERM said his study of people vaccinated in France showed the same flu vaccine as was used in the United States was 60 percent effective.

"The problem with influenza-like illness studies is that there are a lot of things that are influenza-like," Gellin said. He said unless patients are tested to confirm they have influenza, they could have a range of respiratory diseases, none of which a flu vaccine could be expected to prevent.

Dr. Arnold Monto of the University of Michigan said the vaccine studies may be examining too broad a range of people. The symptoms of "influenza-like illness" includes fever, sore throat and a cough.

See related:

Flu shots - how useful are they?

The Fujian virus - promoting flu vaccines

Ninety-three Children Dead of Flu - Majority were vaccinated!

The Avian Flu and Drugless Doctors

Universal Flu Vaccine For Everyone?

On Vaccine Efficacy:
MIRACLE IN THE MAKING: REALITY OR DELUSION?

These articles tie in with the book excerpt by Steven Ransom below:

Drug effective against avian flu

Side effects of Relenza

Book by Steven Ransom: Wake Up To Health In The 21st Century

There have been many instances over recent years that show quite clearly just how adept our governments and media outlets are at creating mass anxiety over even the slightest of diseases. With the news that UK supermarket Asda (Walmart subsidiary) is now offering the flu jab on-site to its customers (at the bargain price of £11.97 as opposed to the normal £20.00), readers are strongly encouraged to acquaint themselves with the tawdry, unethical nature of today's so-called flu protection programmes, before rolling up their sleeves AAARGH! FLU! BUT IS IT SUCH A DREADED DISEASE? We can all remember the headlines over the last few winters: Killer Flu On The Way! New Super Flu Heading for the UK. Britain Braces Itself for an Epidemic. For several years now, every UK newspaper at one time or another has led with graphic accounts of a flu plague threatening to engulf Britain. Take this frenzied headline from The Sunday Mirror, as far back as the 28th September, 1997:

MILLIONS AT RISK FROM KILLER FLU - Doctors are preparing for a massive outbreak of killer flu this winter. Millions of people are expected to die worldwide as a new strain of super-bug sweeps the globe. And with 10 million people in a high-risk category in Britain, the Government has already alerted hospitals - and mortuaries - to the threat. A detailed document sets out how the health service will cope with large numbers of people ill and dying and includes mortuary arrangements for a large number of deaths.

And the result? No flu pandemic. In fact, no flu pandemic anywhere. The lack of any flu plague across the globe did not bring a halt to those killer flu front page specials. With boring monotony, the winters of 1998, 99, 2000, 01, 02, 03, saw the same, tired old headlines appearing in the press. And now (December 2003), these inane headlines are still with us. Take the following health scoop from USA Today, dated December 3rd 2003: The warning sirens are screaming: A deadly, contagious strain of flu will emerge, possibly soon, flu experts say, and the world is not ready to deal with it. "The world will be in deep trouble if the impending influenza pandemic strikes this week, this month, or even this year," write international flu experts Richard Webby and Robert Webster of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis.

And this latest from the UK Daily Express, dated 23rd October 2003: Killer flu hits Britain. Alarmed Health experts warned all doctors that high-risk categories - the elderly and those with heart problems - should be vaccinated. The mutant virus has swept through Australia where it is blamed for thousands of deaths in the worst flu outbreak for five years.

But with no flu outbreaks ever emerging and the death rates in these stories, as we shall discover, always wildly exaggerated, just where were all these headlines coming from? Credence Publications has been following the flu headlines for a number of years now. Predictably, these flu editorials have been nothing more than a pharmaceutical sales pitch. In short, they are a complete scam. It was the following report from the BBC, that prompted our initial investigation into the matter:

"The number of those catching the flu bug has risen by more than 80% in just seven days and hospitals and ambulance services are bracing themselves for a further tide of emergency admissions and deaths. Provisional figures released on Wednesday by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) showed the first large rise in cases in the south as the virus spreads from the North and the Midlands. As the Emergency Bed Service issued a warning that hospitals may run out of beds, it emerged on Wednesday that a second Norfolk hospital is using a refrigerated lorry trailer to act as a standby mortuary." [1]

HARDLY AN EPIDEMIC

Great mileage was made of the death of 33-year-old UK rugby player Kieron Gregory, and of Nigel Tranter, one of Britain's most prolific authors, who succumbed to the deadly plague at aged 90![2] But these star deaths were about the only tragedies the media could muster. Hardly an epidemic.

In another desperate bid to report on something compellingly flu-oriented, one BBC Evening News item featured a roving reporter giving a live update from Scotland's flu outbreak epicentre. The camera panned across a hospital ward containing seven beds, in which lay seven persons all over the age of 65, all suffering from -- mid-January FLU! And of course, because of their age, all these seven people fell comfortably within the risk group associated with contracting flu anyway. Hardly award