Don’t Blame Flu Shots for All Ills, Officials Say

(here is some brain candy for the ones who want to believe the mainstream media and our leaders . . .)

The New York Times
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

As soon as swine flu vaccinations start next month, some people getting them will drop dead of heart attacks or strokes, some children will have seizures and some pregnant women will miscarry.

But those events will not necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine. That poses a public relations challenge for federal officials, who remember how sensational reports of deaths and illnesses derailed the large-scale flu vaccine drive of 1976.

This time they are making plans to respond rapidly to such events and to try to reassure a nervous public — and headline-hunting journalists — that the vaccine is not responsible.

Every year, there are 1.1 million heart attacks in the United States, 795,000 strokes and 876,000 miscarriages, and 200,000 Americans have their first seizure. Inevitably, officials say, some of these will happen within hours or days of a flu shot.

The government “is right to expect coincident deaths, since people are dying every day, with or without flu shots,” said Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine and co-author of “The Epidemic That Never Was,” a history of the 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign.

Officials are particularly worried about spontaneous miscarriages, because they are urging pregnant women to be among the first to be vaccinated. Pregnant women are usually advised to get flu shots, because they and their fetuses are at high risk of flu complications, but this year the pressure is greater. Expectant mothers are normally advised to avoid drugs, alcohol and anything else that might affect a fetus.

“There are about 2,400 miscarriages a day in the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay C. Butler, chief of the swine flu vaccine task force at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “You’ll see things that would have happened anyway. But the vaccine doesn’t cause miscarriages. It also doesn’t cause auto accidents, but they happen.”

In the opening days of the 1976 vaccination campaign, which eventually vaccinated 45 million Americans, three elderly Pittsburgh residents died soon after receiving their shots at the same clinic. Though scientists believe it was just a freakish coincidence, some news reports suggested the vaccine had killed them.

“Press frenzy was so intense it drew a televised rebuke from Walter Cronkite for sensationalizing coincidental happenings,” Dr. David J. Sencer, who was then the director of the C.D.C., wrote in 2006 reflections on the vaccination campaign.

Two months later, reports emerged of vaccine recipients suffering from Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves, leading to temporary or permanent paralysis and, in a few cases, death. That effectively ended the campaign, as officials suspended it to investigate. Experts still disagree over whether the vaccine caused cases to increase that year, and the C.D.C. will be on high alert for reports of it this year.

Guillain-Barré’s cause is unknown, though different studies have suggested it more often affects people who have had a flu shot, the flu itself, some bacterial infections — or even, according to Dr. Sencer’s paper, people who have been struck by lightning.

In any case, after the suspension, there was no reason to restart because the predicted swine flu epidemic never emerged.

Full propaganda piece HERE