43% of Americans Risked Their Brain Health for Flu Shots - Did You?

By Dr. Mercola

November 24, 2011

About 43 percent of the U.S. population opted to get a flu shot last season, a trend that has unfortunately been steadily increasing in the last several years.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 8 million more people received the flu shot in 2010, which CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden told Fox Newsⁱ "is the most people who have ever been vaccinated in this country."
Most likely, this is a direct result of the massive marketing campaign that is ongoing in the United States, encouraging every person 6 months and older to get a flu shot.
Now they're available not only from your physician, but also at your drugstore and supermarket.
The CDC is now encouraging ""universal" flu vaccination in the U.S. to expand protection against the flu to more people" -- a move that is highly suspect considering the lack of evidence supporting their effectiveness and safety.

Flu Vaccines Have Little to No Measurable Benefit

The CDC states that the annual flu vaccine is the "best" way to avoid catching the seasonal flu, but what many fail to realize is that there's virtually NO valid scientific evidence to support it, in either its effectiveness or its safety.
This is particularly true for key target groups for which the CDC says the flu shot is most important, like seniors, children and pregnant women!
Again and again, the Cochrane Database Review—which is the gold standard for assessing the scientific evidence for the effectiveness of commonly used medical interventions—has concluded that flu vaccines do not appear to have any measurable benefit either for children, adults, or seniors.
Take a look at these five Cochrane Database Reviews, published between 2006 and 2010, which call into serious question the claim that flu shots are the best way to stay healthy during the flu season.

Last year, Cochrane reviewed the available scientific evidence that flu shots protect the elderly, and the results were abysmal. The authors concluded:

"The available evidence is of poor quality and provides no guidance regarding the safety, efficacy or effectiveness of influenza vaccines for people aged 65 years or older."

Cochrane reviewers also evaluated whether or not flu shots given to health care workers can help protect the elderly patients in nursing homes with whom they work. The research did not find an effect from the vaccinations on laboratory-confirmed influenza. Influenza vaccinations were also not linked to a reduction in either pneumonia or deaths from pneumonia. In conclusion, the authors state:

"[T]here is no evidence that vaccinating health care workers prevents influenza in elderly residents in long-term care facilities.

Ditto for children. A large-scale, systematic review of 51 studies, published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviewsⁱⁱ in 2006, found no evidence that the flu vaccine is any more effective than a placebo in preventing influenza in children under two. The studies involved 260,000 children, age 6 to 23 months.

Two years, later, in 2008, another Cochrane reviewⁱⁱⁱ again concluded "little evidence is available" that the flu vaccine is effective in preventing influenza in children under the age of two.

As for the general adult population, Cochrane published the following bombshell conclusion^iv last year:

"Influenza vaccines have a modest effect in reducing influenza symptoms and working days lost. There is no evidence that they affect complications, such as pneumonia, or transmission.

WARNING: This review includes 15 out of 36 trials funded by industry (four had no funding declaration). An earlier systematic review of 274 influenza vaccine studies published up to 2007 found industry funded studies were published in more prestigious journals and cited more than other studies independently from methodological quality and size. Studies funded from public sources were significantly less likely to report conclusions favorable to the vaccines.

The review demonstrated that reliable scientific evidence confirming that influenza vaccines are effective is thin and there is plenty of reason to suspect that there may be a manipulation of conclusions when the studies are funded by drug companies. The content and conclusions of this review should be interpreted in light of this finding."

CDC Recommends Flu Shots to Pregnant Women Despite Serious Risks

According to Frieden of the CDC, more pregnant women were vaccinated in 2010 than ever before, and about half of them received a flu shot. Unfortunately, many obstetricians and pediatricians strongly recommend the flu vaccine to their pregnant patients because they simply don't know any better. Most of them simply do so at the urging of the CDC and medical trade associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), as it is a lot easier to just blindly trust and follow the CDC or AAP "recommendations" without really checking into them.
If you were following the latest research, however, you would see a new study that seriously calls into question the wisdom of giving pregnant women flu shots. It examined "the magnitude, time course, and variance in inflammatory responses following seasonal influenza virus vaccination among pregnant women."
The analysis, which assessed women prior to, and at one day, two days, and one week following vaccination, showed significant increases in C-reactive protein (CRP) and other markers of inflammation^v following the vaccinations. Preeclampsia and preterm birth both have an inflammatory component, leading researchers to state that a tendency toward greater inflammatory responding to immune triggers may predict risk of adverse outcomes.
Researchers are now questioning the assumed safety of giving flu shots to pregnant women because stimulating a woman's immune system during midterm and later term pregnancy may significantly increase the risk that her baby will develop autism during childhood and schizophrenia^vi sometime during the teenage years and afterward. This risk is not minor. According to Dr. Blaylock, it's a well-accepted fact within neuroscience that eliciting an immune response during pregnancy increases the risk of autism and schizophrenia in her offspring seven- to 14-fold!
In fact, a number of neurodevelopmental and behavioral problems can occur in babies born to women immunologically stimulated^vii during pregnancy. For example, in one study done by Dr. Laura Hewitson^viii, a professor of obstetrics at the University of Pittsburg Medical Center, found that a single vaccine used in human babies, when used in newborn monkeys, caused significant abnormalities in brainstem development.
Further, this is not even addressing the questionable preservatives and adjuvants added to the flu vaccine.
One place that women go when they're looking for information on how to have a healthy pregnancy and baby is the CDC's own website. There, under "Birth Defects: Having a Healthy Pregnancy," they list the ABC's of pregnancy tips for making sure nothing bad happens to your baby while you're pregnant.
I find it interesting, if not ironic, that the "A" of the ABC's is:

Avoid exposure to toxic substances and chemicals – such as cleaning solvents, lead and mercury, some insecticides, and paint.
Thimerosal, which is 49 percent mercury by volume, is a widely used preservative in most flu injectable vaccines. There are a few million doses of thimerosal-free single dose vials of influenza vaccine manufactured by drug companies that are supposed to be reserved for infants and pregnant women, but there is no data available to show whether pregnant women are in fact getting the thimerosal-free version.

Are Aluminum Adjuvants in Vaccines More Dangerous than Mercury?

Another serious issue, not only for pregnant women and children but for everyone, is aluminum. Aluminum is a known neurotoxin that is contained in a number of common childhood and adult vaccines and may even exceed the toxicity of mercury in the human body.
According to a study published in Current Medical Chemistry^ix, children up to 6 months of age receive 14.7 to 49 times more aluminum from vaccines than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety limits allow.
Like other adjuvants, aluminum is added to the vaccine in order to boost your immune response to the antigen. The antigen is what your body responds to and makes antibodies against (the lab altered bacteria or virus being injected). By boosting your body's immune response, the vaccine manufacturer can use a smaller amount of antigen, which makes production less expensive.
However, although aluminum is a common, "natural" substance, it's important to realize that it has absolutely no biological role inside your body and is, in fact, a demonstrated neurotoxin that may lead to long-term brain inflammation, along with other health problems.
There is overwhelming evidence that chronic immune activation in your brain is a major cause of brain dysfunction in numerous degenerative brain disorders, such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's and ALS, which may explain the reported association between aluminum-containing vaccines and these diseases.
Writing in Current Medicinal Chemistry^x, researchers also noted that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines can carry serious health risks that have not been thoroughly evaluated:

"Despite almost 90 years of widespread use of aluminum adjuvants, medical science's understanding about their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor. There is also a concerning scarcity of data on toxicology and pharmacokinetics of these compounds. In spite of this, the notion that aluminum in vaccines is safe appears to be widely accepted.
Experimental research, however, clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation and associated neurological complications and thus may have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.
In our opinion, the possibility that vaccine benefits may have been overrated and the risk of potential adverse effects underestimated, has not been rigorously evaluated in the medical and scientific community. We hope that the present paper will provide a framework for a much needed and long overdue assessment of this highly contentious medical issue."
It is up to you whether you want to avoid aluminum-containing vaccines, but if you do decide to use them for yourself or your child, you may want to consider separating the administration of aluminum-containing vaccines by several months and choosing single dose or combination vaccines with the lowest aluminum content.
For more information, I strongly urge you to listen to this interview with Dr. Ayoub to learn more about the dangers of this common vaccine adjuvant. You can also read Aluminum in Vaccines -- a Neurological Gamble, an e-book by Neil Miller, director of the Thinktwice Global Vaccine Institute, which documents many of the hazards associated with aluminum-laden vaccines.