WILMINGTON — It's flu season again. That means public health officials are encouraging everyone over six months of age to get a flu shot.
Even if you don't have a primary health care provider, you can stop by your local drugstore to get one. Some businesses even provide on-site flu clinics, and some hospitals require mandatory flu shots for their staff. By 2020, U.S. health leaders would like to see 80 percent of the population get annual shots.
This is great news for vaccine manufacturers. Influenza shots given every year is a multibillion-dollar global bonanza.
The question is, are flu shots all they are cracked up to be?
According to Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, as well as its Center of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance, “It does not protect as promoted. It's all a sales job; it's all public relations.”
Have flu vaccines been tested? Yes, but the problem is that only about half of the studies are published.
However, the Cochrane Collaboration, one of the world's most-respected companies publishing systematic reviews of randomized controlled studies, concluded flu vaccination offered little to no benefit in offering immunity to the flu.
This analysis was based on 50 studies with more than 70,000 participants. Unfortunately, because only half of drug trial data is published, pharmaceutical companies have a strong bias toward revealing the positive results. Trials indicating the negative effects are often not reported.
Richard Bacon, a member of the Public Accounts Commission in Great Britain, says, “The full results of clinical trials are being routinely and legally withheld from doctors and researchers by the manufacturers of medicine.”
The UK has agreed that clinical trials need to be more open and transparent as well as registered on a public database. The lack of a full spectrum of data on the effectiveness of the flu vaccines in the United States is of extreme concern. This kind of information is not open and transparent in this country.
One must take time to research and probe a variety of websites and informational sources to discover the vaccine ingredients, side effects, and whether it would be safe and effective for one's age group and medical conditions.
It seems that we, the American public, have no choice but to submit to a flu shot every year in hopes of protecting ourselves against whatever strain of influenza is lurking in the air around us. Whatever happened to the old-fashioned customs of reducing the risk of influenza and flulike infection - customs like washing your hands more often? There is a lot of evidence that this measure works.
For more in-depth information about vaccines and vaccine choice, check out the Coalition for Vaccine Choice website. This website was created by volunteers who came together as a result of legislation that threatened to take away vaccine exemptions in Vermont.