|
|
Many millions of doses of this swine flu vaccine have been ordered by governments worldwide and this looks like it will be the biggest mass vaccination programme ever.
Many people seem to have been brainwashed by the medical and pharmaceutical industries, working closely with governments, into believing that they "must" or "should" get themselves vaccinated. In Singapore as I write this on Nov 13, more than 271,000 vaccine doses have been ordered but only 250,000 are available. Demand has already outstripped supply.
At the same time, some of the warnings about H1N1 vaccine risks seem to be filtering through. People are concerned about possible flu shot side effects.
A decision on whether or not to proceed with H1N1 vaccination, however, can simply be made by answering a few simple questions: Do you need it? Is it effective? Is it safe?
Do you need the H1N1 vaccine?
So far, the H1N1 swine flu has proven to be mild. It affects many people, but only in a mild way -- they develop mild symptoms like low grade fever, or a bit of cough, body ache, etc. And they quickly recover.
Few people actually die from the H1N1 swine flu. Worldwide, the death toll has exceeded 6.700 as of mid-November 2009. Of course, every death is a tragedy, but when seen from the broader perspective, this is a very tiny figure - compared with the 20 million to 100 million people estimated to have died in the 1918 Spanish flu, the two million who died in the 1956-58 Asian flu or the one million who died in the 1968 Hong Kong flu.
The wide consensus of medical experts is that the H1N1 swine flu is not more dangerous than regular seasonal flus. So if you never previously needed vaccination against the seasonal flu, do you really need a H1N1 vaccine?
We also need to question whether these people really died because of the H1N1 virus? In Singapore, 16 people are said to have died from the H1N1 flu, but every one of them was already immune-compromised or had other medical conditions to begin with. Click to read a discussion about what the H1N1 deaths statistics really mean.
Interestingly, the Journal of General internal Medicine reported in February 2006 that 70 percent of doctors and 62 percent of healthcare workers DO NOT take flu shots. These are the people who advocate and administer flu vaccines. They are also the people said to be in greatest need of "protection" since they constantly come into contact with flu sufferers. Yet the majority of them don't take flu vaccination. Why?
Is the H1N1 vaccine effective?
The Cochrane Collaboration is an international not-for-profit organisation that seeks to improve healthcare decision-making globally, through systematic reviews of the effects of healthcare interventions. In a 2006 master study that reviewed 40 major studies on flu vaccines, the Cochrane Collaboration concluded that, in general, flu vaccines are :
Cochrane reviewer Dr Tom Jefferson, an expert on the effectiveness of vaccinations, recently gave several high profile press interviews about the flu. In July 2009, Dr Tom Jefferson told Das Spiegel: “In the best of cases, the few decent studies that exist show that the vaccine mainly works with healthy young adults. With children and the elderly, it only helps a little, if at all.”
In September 2009, Dr Tom Jefferson told The Financial Times about flu vaccines: “Do we know they are safe, or what the side effect profile is? No, we don’t... Do we have a mechanism for dealing with vaccines which perform poorly or not at all? Not evidently.
This brings us to the third question...
Is the H1N1 vaccine safe?
The H1N1 vaccine has been hurriedly produced and distributed - even before studies about its effectiveness and safety have been completed. A number of such studies have barely started and are due for completion at end-2010, yet the vaccine is already being administered to millions of people at end-2009.
Those who claim that the H1N1 vaccine is safe point out that it is no different from regular seasonal flu vaccines and, therefore, "just as safe" as these other vaccines. Another way of looking at such statements, however, is that the latest vaccine is "just as dangerous".
As I write this (on 13 November 2009), I just received news that a teenager in Virginia, USA, developed the rare crippling disease, Guillain-Barre syndrome within hours of receiving the flu shot. Yet the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention said there was "no link" between the disease and the flu shot. His case was dismissed as a "coincidence" since between 100 and 200 people in the US develop Guillain-Barre syndrome each year anyway.
More outrageously, the incident was cited as another proof of the "safety" of the H1N1 vaccine -- because Guillain Barre sydrome is expected to affect about one out of every 1 million people who receive the regular, seasonal flu shot, but as of mid-November 2009, there were only five reported cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome (not including the latest) out of some 40 million H1N1 vaccine doses available (but not necessarily administered yet).
One of the worst incidents involving flu vaccination was the 1976 swine flu outbreak in the US, which, incidentally, also involved a strain of the H1N1 virus. The flu was detected at an army camp at an army camp at Fort Dix from 19 January to 9 February and was said to have resulted in one death and 13 hospitalisations.
No H1N1 flu cases were reported outside Fort Dix. Yet the US government embarked on a mass-vaccination programme in which 40 million were given the flu vaccine. The result:
This, clearly, was one incident where flu vaccination caused far greater harm than the flu itself. The vaccination programme was halted on 16 December that year, by which time about 25 percent of the population had been vaccinated. The incident was so bad that is it referred to as the swine flu fiasco, or the swine flu debacle.
Have we learned from that incident? Apparently not.
Click the following links for more discussions about:
When you know what ingredients go into making a flu vaccine, you probably will not want to take it. If you are not in the mood for reading a lenghty article about flu shot ingredients, just watch this video, produced by the Royal Canadian Air Farce:
But if you do enjoy reading. I highly recommend this article on the H1N1 vaccine by Dr Ben Kim. It is one of the best articles on the subject that I've come across.