Marketing of the flu vaccine is at a fever (sorry couldn’t help myself) pitch across the country. It’s harder to not get a flu shot than it is to get one at this point. Just try walking into a pharmacy without bumping into someone eagerly trying to stick you with a life saving syringe full of flu vaccine. But is it really necessary? Does the vaccine protect you from getting the flu, and if you do get the flu is it really as deadly as the marketing would like you to believe? That is what this article from a Harvard researcher published in one of the premier medical journals, the British Medical Journal, sought to find out.

Influenza vaccine was first developed in 1960 and through the 1990s it was used primarily to protect the elderly since they were the part of the population most likely to die from complications related to the flu. After 2000, who was at risk from serious complications was slowly expanded until were we are now, when they recommend every man, woman and child over six months old needs to be vaccinated. What was this expanded need to vaccinate everyone based on?

The CDC states that the vaccine saves lives based on two studies. Both looked back at populations and found that those who had the flu vaccine were 30-40% less likely to die from any cause related to the flu including diseases like pneumonia. This may be an important time to mention the studies were funded by the CDC and the National Vaccine Program Office. The claim that the vaccine can prevent nearly half of all deaths related to the flu seems overstated and caused many non CDC researchers to question them especially when only 5% of wintertime deaths are attributed to influenza. What the researchers found was that these two studies didn’t account for the fact that people who are generally healthier are the ones who are getting the vaccine. In fact the CDCs own national guidelines account for this stating “…studies demonstrating large reductions in hospitalizations and deaths among the vaccinated elderly have been conducted using medical record databases and have not measured reductions in laboratory-confirmed influenza illness. These studies have been challenged because of concerns that they have not controlled  adequately for differences in the propensity for healthier persons to be more likely than less healthy persons to receive vaccination.” So the CDC acknowledges that the studies are flawed but does nothing to improve them nor do they change their recommendations on vaccination.

Misquoting and misusing research studies just becomes the norm for the CDC as another study shows. A preliminary study, also done by the CDC, showed that if you had the flu vaccine you were 62% less likely for it to be severe enough to need to see your doctor. On the evening news this was changed to getting the vaccine meant you were 62% less likely to die, even though the study did not look at death rates at all. Later the CDC researchers tried to say well at least 62% didn’t develop serve complications like pneumonia, but the study didn’t look at severe complications either, so there is no basis for that claim. There is also another huge fact left out of this preliminary study that came out one month later. Remember when we started, the vaccine was originally designed to protect the elderly. In this study 90% of the people were under 65 years of age. When they broke down the statistics to just look at the elderly portion in the study there was no significant benefit to the vaccine.

In order to get more people vaccinated against the flu the push also has to be to sell people on the fact that the flu is a dangerous, deadly disease. Some propaganda states death tolls from 3,000 to 49,000 people per year even though there was a huge decline in deaths from influenza in the 1990s long before the push for vaccination. The most enlightening and frightening part of this whole article for me was that the marketing strategy all comes down to a name. It is assumed that the “flu” and “influenza” are one in the same. They are not. The vaccine is to protect against hundreds of strains of wild influenza. Three to four of these strains are put in the vaccine. Most cases of the flu however have nothing to do with influenza. Every year hundreds of thousands of samples are taken of sick people and only 16% of those with the flu test positive for influenza. So the “flu shot” doesn’t even protect against most flus.

British Medical Journal 2013;346:f3037