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Johns Hopkins Scientist Reveals Shocking Report on Flu Vaccines

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Posted by Louise Turner in Health
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Johns Hopkins Scientist, Peter Doshi, Ph.D., Reveals Shocking Report on Flu Vaccines

A Johns Hopkins scientist has issued a blistering report on influenza vaccines in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Peter Doshi, Ph.D., charges that although the vaccines are being pushed on the public in unprecedented numbers, they are less effective and cause more side effects than alleged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Further, says Doshi, the studies that underlie the CDC’s policy of encouraging most people to get a yearly flu shot are often low quality studies that do not substantiate the official claims.

Promoting influenza vaccines is one of the most visible and aggressive public health policies in the United States, says Doshi of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Drug companies and public officials press for widespread vaccination each fall, offering vaccinations in drugstores and supermarkets. The results have been phenomenal. Only 20 years ago, 32 million doses of influenza vaccine were available in the United States on an annual basis. Today, the total has skyrocketed to 135 million doses.

“The vaccine may be less beneficial and less safe than has been claimed, and the threat of influenza seems to be overstated,” Doshi says. Mandatory vaccination polices have been enacted, often in healthcare facilities, forcing some people to take the vaccine under threat of losing their jobs.

The main assertion of the CDC that fuels the push for flu vaccines each year is that influenza comes with a risk of serious complications which can cause death, especially in senior citizens and those suffering from chronic illnesses. That’s not the case, said Doshi.

When read carefully, the CDC acknowledges that studies finding any perceived reduction in death rates may be due to the “healthy-user effect” — the tendency for healthier people to be vaccinated more than less-healthy people. The only randomized trial of influenza vaccine in older people found no decrease in deaths. “This means that influenza vaccines are approved for use in older people despite any clinical trials demonstrating a reduction in serious outcomes,” says Doshi.

Even when the vaccine is closely matched to the type of influenza that’s prevalent, which doesn’t happen every year, randomized, controlled trials of healthy adults found that vaccinating between 33 and 100 people resulted in one less case of influenza. In addition, says Doshi, no evidence exists to show that this reduction in the risk of influenza for a specific population — here in the United States, among healthy adults, for example — extrapolates into any reduced risk of serious complications from influenza, such as hospitalizations or deaths, among seniors.

“For most people, and possibly most doctors, officials need only claim that vaccines save lives, and it is assumed there must be solid research behind it,” says Doshi. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, he says.

Although the CDC implies that flu vaccines are safe and there’s no need to weigh benefits against risk, Doshi disagrees. He points to an Australian study that found one in every 110 children under the age of five had convulsions following vaccinations in 2009 for H1N1 influenza. Additional investigations found that the H1N1 vaccine was also associated with a spike in cases of narcolepsy among adolescents.

Doshi’s concerns echo those of Dr. Russell Blaylock, a neurosurgeon and author of “The Blaylock Wellness Report” who has deep concerns over the safety and efficacy of the flu vaccine.

Not only is the vaccine not safe, Dr. Blaylock tells Newsmax Health, it doesn’t even work. “The vaccine is completely worthless, and the government knows it,” he says. “There are three reasons the government tells the elderly why they should get flu shots: secondary pneumonia, hospitalization, and death. Yet a study by the Cochrane group studied hundreds of thousands of people and found it offered zero protection for those three things in the general community. It offered people in nursing homes some immunity against the flu — at best one-third — but that was only if they picked the right vaccine.”

A study released in February found that the flu shot was only 9 percent effective in protecting seniors against the 2012-2013 season’s most virulent influenza bug.

What’s even worse is that small children who are given the flu vaccine get no protection from the disease. “The government also says that every baby over the age of six months should have a vaccine, and they know it contains a dose of mercury that is toxic to the brain,” says Dr. Blaylock. “They also know the studies have shown that the flu vaccine has zero — zero — effectiveness in children under five.”

For most people, says Dr. Blaylock, flu vaccines don’t prevent the flu but actually increase the odds of getting it. The mercury contained in vaccines is such a strong immune depressant that a flu shot suppresses immunity for several weeks. “This makes people highly susceptible to catching the flu,” he says. “They may even think the vaccine gave them the flu, but that’s not true — it depressed their immune system and then they caught the flu.”

Mercury overstimulates the brain for several years, says Dr. Blaylock, and that activation is the cause of Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases. One study found that those who get the flu vaccine for three to five years increase their risk of Alzheimer’s disease 10-fold.

Doshi asserts that influenza is a case of “disease mongering” in an effort to expand markets. He points to the fact that deaths from flu declined sharply during the middle of the 20th century, long before the huge vaccine campaigns that kicked off the 21st century.

Why do drug companies push the flu vaccine? “It’s all about money,” says Dr. Blaylock. “Vaccines are a pharmaceutical company’s dream. They have a product that both the government and the media will help them sell, and since vaccines are protected, they can’t be sued if anyone has a complication.”

Doshi’s article “is a breath of fresh air,” says Dr. Blaylock. “This article exposes in well-defined and articulate terms what has been known for a long time — the flu vaccine promotion is a fraud.

“Here’s the bottom line,” says Dr. Blaylock. “The vast number of people who get the flu vaccine aren’t going to get any benefit, but they get all of the risks and complications.”

Source: newsmaxhealth.com, The British Medical Journal
Article by SYLVIA BOOTH HUBBARD / Real Farmacy

- See more at: Johns Hopkins Scientist Reveals Shocking Report on Flu Vaccines


Is it me or are these companies breaking the very ethics of medicine?!
 
@Akheilos

Firstly, opinions published in prestigious medical journals such as JAMA or BMJ and by someone from Johns Hopkins cant just be brushed aside by simply stating them as work of a snake oil peddler.

Secondly, the work was published by Dr. Peter Doshi who at present is an Assistant Professor of pharmaceutical health services research in the School of Pharmacy, University of Maryland, AND NOT by Dr. Russell Blaylock.

Unfortunately uneducated comments such as these are not uncommon from people outside the profession.

jis ka kaam usi ko saajhey, aur karey to thenga baajey.

As a molecular virologist, I am aware of this controversy and Dr. Doshi certainly has raised some valid concerns.
 
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I wonder what happened to good old ways of letting your body fight the disease. If totally against the flu shots, if it comes let your body's natural ammune system fight it off. Survival of the fittest does not only apply to human and animals it also applies to germs and becteria and those are becoming stronger and adapting to survive flue vaccine and results is all these new variations of flue never seen before.
 
Yes, let us try to portray the US companies making the vaccines as evil, while ignoring polio vaccinations in Pakistan and all the good that vaccines do worldwide.

Wonderfully predictable actions of the so-called "educated" extremists. :D
I hope the flu shot isnt causing these answers ^^
 
@Akheilos

Firstly, opinions published in prestigious medical journals such as JAMA or BMJ and by someone from Johns Hopkins cant just be brushed aside by simply stating them as work of a snake oil peddler.

Secondly, the work was published by Dr. Peter Doshi who at present is an Assistant Professor of pharmaceutical health services research in the School of Pharmacy, University of Maryland, AND NOT by Dr. Russell Blaylock.

Unfortunately uneducated comments such as these are not uncommon from people outside the profession.

jis ka kaam usi ko saajhey, aur karey to thenga baajey.

As a molecular virologist, I am aware of this controversy and Dr. Doshi certainly has raised some valid concerns.
Yes I understand....even when we were learning introduction to Immunology we covered points which even back then as a BSc raised questions in my class about why we get "certain" vaccines back then the flu shot wasnt compulsory

Even back then the ethics of many MNC drug co. was questioned....That was just the minds of a BSc student....learning introduction to our immune system.....

When I first started working in labs (after BSc) we were literally grilled about ethics and safety which would be common sense literally....

Then I saw a lot which really made me realize why we were grilled.....Not everyone has common sense :D
 

Non-epidemiologist tries to do epidemiology, feeds anti-vaccine activists
Posted on July 25, 2013 by Reuben

One of the rules of this blog has been to not name any names, but it’s going to be broken for this post because it’s hard not to break it in this case. The person I’m going to write about is putting himself out there, sometimes vociferously, to say some things that, as an epidemiologist, I find frustrating. First, a little background. A few months ago, a friend of this blog wrote this post about influenza vaccines. In that post’s comments, the name of one Peter Doshi, PhD, came up. Dr. Doshi wrote this article in the British Medical Journal and delivered this presentation (PDF) at the “Selling Sickness 2013″ conference in Washington, DC. In his article and his presentation, Dr. Doshi, who is not an epidemiologist, makes some clear mistakes about the nature of the yearly flu epidemics that we see, the deaths from influenza, and the benefits/risks of the influenza vaccine.

It’s a lot to go through, but it’s necessary to do so because Dr. Doshi’s work is coming up more and more in anti-vaccine sites like here, here, here, here, and here. Dr. Doshi makes two claims about the flu and the flu vaccine. First, that the flu doesn’t kill as many people as claimed by public health agencies (and that not that many people get it each winter), and, second, that the flu vaccine is not as safe nor effective as it is claimed to be. (If I have time as I’m writing this, I’ll touch on his claim that the alerts over pandemic flu are a way to “sell” fear or some such.)

First, Dr. Peter Doshi claims that the flu ain’t all that bad. He heavily criticizes the estimated numbers of deaths attributable to influenza:

“US data on influenza deaths are a mess. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledges a difference between flu death and flu associated death yet uses the terms interchangeably. Additionally, there are significant statistical incompatibilities between official estimates and national vital statistics data. Compounding these problems is a marketing of fear—a CDC communications strategy in which medical experts “predict dire outcomes” during flu seasons.”

And, from his presentation:



Here’s the thing about influenza deaths, from an epidemiological point of view. They are not reportable to public health. That is, healthcare providers and others are not required to report each influenza death (or influenza-related death) to public health authorities like they have to do with cases of Legionnaires’ Disease or meningitis. Some states do actively look for deaths associated with influenza through searching for a mention of influenza in death certificates. Others use what little money they have to pay investigators to go looking for influenza-associated deaths in hospital records of people who die at hospitals from things like pneumonia and sepsis. It seems to me that Dr. Doshi’s world is not perfect, and whatever estimation is done by CDC and others is just a “PR” ploy.

“CDC states that the historic 1968-9 “Hong Kong flu” pandemic killed 34 000 Americans. At the same time, CDC claims 36 000 Americans annually die from flu. What is going on?

Meanwhile, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), “influenza and pneumonia” took 62 034 lives in 2001—61 777 of which were attributed to pneumonia and 257 to flu, and in only 18 cases was flu virus positively identified. Between 1979 and 2002, NCHS data show an average 1348 flu deaths per year (range 257 to 3006).”

See, as an epidemiologist in our nation’s capital, I know that that these numbers are all estimates, and that they’re estimates based on surveillance systems. That is why Dr. Peter Doshi seems to be confused enough to ask “What is going on?” What’s going on is that not everyone who gets the flu gets tested, not everyone who gets tested tests positive even if they have the flu because of a limitation in screening tests, and not everyone who tests positive gets reported to public health, even if they die. It’s not a PR ploy to quote these numbers because they’re based on the best available evidence. As CDC puts it:

“CDC does not know exactly how many people die from seasonal flu each year. There are several reasons for this. First, states are not required to report individual seasonal flu cases or deaths of people older than 18 years of age to CDC. Second, seasonal influenza is infrequently listed on death certificates of people who die from flu-related complications. Third, many seasonal flu-related deaths occur one or two weeks after a person’s initial infection, either because the person may develop a secondary bacterial co-infection (such as bacterial pneumonia) or because seasonal influenza can aggravate an existing chronic illness (such as congestive heart failure or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). Also, most people who die from seasonal flu-related complications are not tested for flu, or they seek medical care later in their illness when seasonal influenza can no longer be detected from respiratory samples. Sensitive influenza tests are only likely to detect influenza if performed within a week after onset of illness. In addition, some commonly used tests to diagnose influenza in clinical settings are not highly sensitive and can provide false negative results (i.e. the misdiagnose flu illness as not being flu.) For these reasons, many flu-related deaths may not be recorded on death certificates. These are some of the reasons that CDC and other public health agencies in the United States and other countries use statistical models to estimate the annual number of seasonal flu-related deaths. (Flu deaths in children were made a nationally notifiable condition in 2004, and since then, states have been required to report flu-related child deaths in the United States through the Influenza Associated Pediatric Mortality Surveillance System).”

Told you. Maybe Dr. Doshi should read how epidemiologists do these death estimates. Maybe he’d come to the conclusion that we’ve all come to: YES, THE FLU KILLS.

Second, Dr. Peter Doshi claims that the flu vaccine is more dangerous than we’re told and less effective than what we’re told. The effectiveness is the easy part. That one was covered by our friend in his post that I mentioned above and in an article he wrote for the History of Vaccines blog. The tl;dr version of those posts is that the vaccine is effective at different levels and for different populations. If you’re an older adult, the nasal spray will do squat for you, but it will really protect you if you’re very young. With the injectable vaccine, it will help you if you’re 18 to 64, and we can’t say that it will help in the other age groups. Although, studies have shown that the injected vaccine reduces mortality in the elderly, a point which Dr. Doshi doesn’t like. Why? Because, according to him, vaccines didn’t save us.



If that argument sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a common anti-vaccine talking point to point at graphs of mortality and say, “Look! Deaths from flu were way down before the vaccine ever came along!” Never mind that the vaccine reduced incidence of cases and death was more likely reduced through antibiotics for secondary infections and intubation for really complicated pneumonias. If you were to plot the number of influenza cases with and without a vaccine, the cases would be less. The ironic part is that Dr. Doshi mentions this in one of his slides:



But, to him, a reduction of 50% is meaningless since it’s just one less person per 100. If we epidemiologists do the math, this turns out to be a few million in the United States alone, let alone the rest of the world. That’s not peanuts. That’s not nothing. That’s actual people who would not get the flu, not miss work, not miss school, not be at risk for complications, not pass it on to someone who could die from it, etc, etc, etc. That’s what we in public health think of when we look at the effectiveness of vaccines. The numbers may be cold, but to us they’re alive, they mean people.

Speaking of numbers, the influenza virus was not discovered until 1936, and, even then, diagnostics for it were not widely available for a long, long time. So how is it that he can plot influenza deaths during the 1930-31 influenza season? But I digress…

It’s very sad and disconcerting that Dr. Peter Doshi’s credentials as a post-doc researcher at Hopkins have made his opinions so valuable to the anti-vaccine crowds. As some of you may know, our friend is going to Hopkins to get his Doctor of Public Health degree in Epidemiology. It is my sincere hope that he runs into Dr. Doshi and they have a chat. Perhaps there’ll be graphs and charts explained. Perhaps Dr. Peter Doshi will have an epidemiology night school lesson. Above all, I hope that Dr. Doshi learns that his arguments are giving credence to some far-fetched ideas, and that he is not an epidemiologist.

Last, but not least, some other bloggers’ opinions on Dr. Peter Doshi:

Crank “scientific” conferences: A parody of science-based medicine that can deceive even reputable scientists and institutions

Unhelpful Commentary

And Orac’s take on Dr. Doshi’s opinions.
 
some other bloggers’ opinions
Sounds a little but hurt people...

Peter Doshi is an assistant professor of pharmaceutical health services research in the School of Pharmacy and associate editor at The BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal). His research focuses on policies related to drug safety and effectiveness evaluation in the context of regulation, evidence-based medicine, and debates over access to data.
 
Sure, let's try that experiment with polio in FATA. How is that working out?
Improve awareness first, fix sanitation and spread before sitting down and applying what you claim...
 
Sounds a little but hurt people...

Peter Doshi is an assistant professor of pharmaceutical health services research in the School of Pharmacy and associate editor at The BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal). His research focuses on policies related to drug safety and effectiveness evaluation in the context of regulation, evidence-based medicine, and debates over access to data.


So not a real doctor :D . More of a media policy guy .
 
Improve awareness first, fix sanitation and spread before sitting down and applying what you claim...

Whats the point of It . We will fight polio like old times with our body :D .
 
Sounds a little but hurt people...

Peter Doshi is an assistant professor of pharmaceutical health services research in the School of Pharmacy and associate editor at The BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal). His research focuses on policies related to drug safety and effectiveness evaluation in the context of regulation, evidence-based medicine, and debates over access to data.

Also people who oppose him are stalwarts like this : David Gorski - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Whats the point of It . We will fight polio like old times with our body :D .
When is it that you need vaccine? Tell me the basics

Also people who oppose him are stalwarts like this : David Gorski - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An oncologist? Seriously? You want to compare an oncologist with one whose job runs on research on policies

pharmaceutical health services research

policies related to drug safety and effectiveness evaluation in the context of regulation, evidence-based medicine, and debates over access to data.
 
@Syed.Ali.Haider

Much disappointed. Why the trolling?

Sir, the topic is itself a troll thread, made with malafide intentions. We need to support vaccination, not fall prey to bizarre conspiracy theories. Our children deserve better than to be victims to crap like this.

I trust I make my point of view clear. To satisfy you, I am bowing out of this thread. Please let the pseduo-science flow. :D
 
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